19 - Evacuation of England- The Twist in the Gulf Stream by Louis Pope Gratacap

This intriguing book begins with a theoretical exploration of a catastrophic geological event but quickly evolves into a profound reflection on the essence of English identity. As it unfolds, it culminates in a passionate defense of America, offering readers a unique perspective on both nations. (Summary by Judi Mason)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter nine, Part one of the Evacuation of England by L. P. Gretecath.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The spectacle.
It was two days later than the events narrated above
that Leicraft and Thomson, with Miss Tobet between them, sat
in a crowded window on Hammersmith Road, watching for the

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enormous procession that had been slowly winding through London with
offices and services, halts and functions. As the King sadly
led the departure of the English people from the Mother
of Nations, and the vast pageant approached down Kensington Road,
its first glittering sallies were seen the block of London Police,

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a gorgeous cavalcade behind them of the peers of the realm,
and in the immeasurable distance the shimmering parts that looked
stationary and yet were coming on with ample speed. The
blaring trumpets in the bands drew near. The street was
cleared from curb to curb. The dense assemblage covering stoop

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and roof and leaning from every window became silent. The
reiterated thud of the falling feet was heard, and in
an instant the marching host was passing beneath them. The
police and the peers of the realm passed in silence
or with barely noticeable tokens of recognition. The peers presented

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a dazzling array on superbly caparisoned horses and in the
regalia of their separate stations, with a bearing of unmistakable dignity,
and possessing in a large measure the impress and gift
of english manly beauty. They uttered the note of caste.
Behind them came the marshaled church, a wonderful picture choirs

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of boys surpliced and gowned in open carriages, Priests and
bishops in their robes of office, with flying standards of
chapel church or cathedral, golden lambs, crosses and crowns, figures
and moths on white silk or ruby silk in wavering confusion,
while hymns and wavering sopranos rose petulantly or again with

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sustained vitality and strength. It appealed to the people. Strangely,
they became very still, and faces contorted with sobs, or
heads bowed to hide the unbidden tears. For a few
moments drew a veil of gloom over the splendid show.
After the church and the peers, a forest of equipages

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brought in view the marvelous display of the robed and
crowned peeresses, and succeeding this shining cloud of matrons that
gave the touch of tenderness, the atmosphere of feminine companionship
and endurance, as if the mothers of England responded in
this untoward hour with an embracing sympathy. After them came

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the king's household, and the King, with outriders, equerries, and
panoplied footmen, a miracle of ostentatious and ceremonial color. His
equipage was drawn by ten jet black stallions with diapers
of the king's colors on their backs, and a line
of ancient guardsmen with pikes in their hands hedging them in,

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and a footman in sparkling white at the head of
each horse. The King was himself robed in the gowns
of his high estate, and was uncovered the crown resting
on a cushion in front of him. A cheer rent
the air. Unfurled flags and fluttering handkerchiefs turned a sea
of faces into an ocean of white and red pennants.

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The King gravely acknowledged the salute and bowed to right
and left. He was alone. The queen had been enthroned
among the peeresses. After the King came the Mayor of London,
and with all the antiquated grandeur of his office, coach,
beefeaters and all. And the people settled back again to

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their lunches which had been interrupted by the king. Then
came the troops. The display was exhaustive. It was conceived
upon a scale of imperial magnificence, and it appealed, in
the succession of its gorgeous units, to the historic sense,
to that divine purpose of continuity which every Englishman instinctively

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appropriates to his race and nation. It represented the chronological
development of the English Army, as its sonorous length defiled
before Laocraft, he saw an objective symbol, nay, the corporeal
fact of England's growing power. Regiment after regiment made a

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pictorial calendar from sixteen sixty to nineteen hundred, And to
the informed mind, what a vista of martial glory, what
a presentation of advance and retreat over the tractless wastes
of the world. They made. It was a trampling chronicle
of woe and fame, shame and satisfaction. It embodied the

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progress of ideas, the clash of political tendencies, the spreading
domination of English rule. It was a panorama of battles,
the tide of victory, the ebbing terrors of defeat. It
reflected the pages of political designs, political subterfuge, political confusion.

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The music that swelled from its ranks now scent the
long waves of its solemn processional melody through the thrilled spectators,
now in limpid folk songs quivering delightfully in their ears,
and now again summoned them to their feet with the
stately and pious invocation of the nation's hymn. The scarlet

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uniforms of the first Lifeguards passed, and Maystricht, Boyne, the
Peninsula and Waterloo flashed in view. The regiment, which was
raised in Holland by King Charles the Second and was
composed of eighty gentlemen whose sobriquet of the Cheeses, along
with other lifeguards, had been acquired from the contemptuous refusal

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of their veterans to serve in them when remodeled, because
they were no longer composed of gentlemen, but of cheesemongers again.
The Second Lifeguards revived the stained memory of the Stuarts,
its own exile in the Netherlands, its return with the restoration,
and its sea green facings pleasantly restored for a moment

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the face of the injured Queen Caroline. Here were the
Royal horse Guards that inherited, or at least might claim,
the virtues of the Parliamentary Army, which fought with dogmas
at the ends of their pike staffs and convictions in
their hearts. Now passed the First Dragoon Guards, that carried

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on its proud records the Battle of the Boorn in
sixteen ninety, Uenard in seventeen o eight, Mile Plaquet in
seventeen o nine, Fontenoi in seventeen forty five, Waterloo in
eighteen fifteen, and Pequin in eighteen sixty, though to Laocraft's
sensitive mind the last was an inscription of disgrace the

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beating hoofs of the Queen's bays. The Second Dragoon Guards
hurried the reminiscent admirer back to Lucknow and the Indian Mutiny.
The nodding plumes of the Prince of Wales with the
rising sun and the red Dragon which came in view
with the Third Dragoon Guards unfailingly recalled to the custodians

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of English military renown that the regiment captured the standard
and kettledrums of the Bavarian Guards at the Battle of Ramillay,
trampling on the heels of their horses. The lordly Blue
Horse defiled passed. And the Fifth Dragoon Guards, which supported
the vital legend Vestigia nullah retorsum, and which captured four

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standards at the Battle of Blenhem. Still the endless lines
advanced wavered stood still, and again, with rattling and shivering
harness passed. Now it was the Second Dragoons, the Scotch Grays,
raised in Scotland and older than any other dragoons in
the British Army, that started the furious applause, an ovation

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not unintelligently bestowed, for it was they who captured the
colors of the French at Ramillie and their standards at Dettingen.
Now it was the Black Dragoons, the sixth on its
glistening horses, once part of the Inniskilling forces, and still
bearing as its crest the Castle of Inniskilling. Now the

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eighth Hussers, whose Protestant fealty had made their founders defenders
of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne,
and who with signal power captured forty four stands of
colors and seventy two guns at the Battle of Lessoiree.
Now the fifteenth Hussers, who bore upon their helmets the

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dazzling inscription five battalions of French defeated and taken by
this regiment with their colors and nine pieces of cannon
at Emesdorf, sixteenth of July seventeen sixty, swelling hearts greeted
the Grenadier Guards, rich in the legacy of the fame
of the defeated French Imperial Guards. Here were the Dublin Fusiliers,

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the green Linnets, the Diehards, the East Surreys, the West
Yorks and Devons, who had been part of that indiscriminate
blunder and glory the Boer War. And now the infantry
inclosing ranks unrolled the endless phalanxes, where regiments as entire
units were absent. Companies took their places and English cheers

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saluted the swinging standards, the thirty fifth, which took the
Royal roussilion French grenadiers at the Battle of Quebec, the
thirty fourth, which impregnably covered the retreat from Fontenoy, the
thirty ninth, which defended Gibraltar in seventeen eighty and captured
the insurgents guns and standers at Maharajpour in eighteen forty three,

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along with the fortieth. The forty second, with the red
heckel in its bonnets to commemorate its capture of the
French standards of the Invincible Legion in eighteen o one,
as well as forests distinguished ardor in the Battle of
guilder Mausen in seventeen ninety five, and the little fighting
toms stirred the crowds, and even to those who regarded

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the pageant with glances of bitterness, the hollow mask of
a cruel abdication, even to their glassy stare, this epic
review brought a momentary gleam of gratitude and pride. Here
was the forty sixth, whose colonel with the English nonchalance
which always win so enduring a regard with Englishmen in

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spite of a kind of artifice of mere stubbornness in it,
preached a sermon to his men under a heavy fire,
about the Lacedaemonians and their discipline, and which at least
to an American awoke only hateful memories. And here the fiftieth,
the blind half hundred, who fought with damaged eyes in Egypt,

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and who shone resplendent with courage and gallant sacrifice at
Vimeira Ah. And here was the fifty seventh, the diehards,
which had thirty bullets through the King's colors, and only
one officer out of twenty four and one hundred and
sixty eight men out of five hundred and eighty four
left stone. At Albuera, the people shouted and stormed. An

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avalanche of flags suddenly sprang up over the walled street,
and at points showers of flowers and bags of fruit
descended in a tornado of delight. Surely, if Englishmen had
such blood in them, the nation would yet live. Here
were the men from India, the regiments of the seventy third,
the seventy fourth, wearing the badge of the Elephant, the

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seventy sixth iiO that unfurled its victorious pennance at the
Battle of Lesoiree, and the seventy seventh and seventy eighth,
and on on straight in the line brave squadrons, whose
elusive recognition in a numeral connoted glorious deeds, defiant strength,
the prodigal powers of the brave. The thundering salutations drowned

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the rollicking music of clear the way, the cry at Boroso, which,
with feife and drum announced the approach of the eighty seventh,
the Prince of Wales's own Irish, and the eighty eighth
the Connaught Rangers, whose more loving sobriquet was the Devil's
on Connaught Boys, from its gallantry in action and its

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irregularities in quarters, uniform and vanity with reciprocal enhancement, made
the Argyleshire Highlanders and the Gordon Highlanders and the Sutherland
Highlanders an envious spectacle to manly youth, a vision of
ingratiating heroes to feminine beauty. Again. India sprang back to memory,

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perhaps not without to souls of Leocraft's fiber, inflicting some
stinging stabs of remorse. When the one hundred foot the
one hundred and second foot, the lambs, the one hundred
and third foot, the old tufts, the one hundred and
fourth foot, and seventh and eighth and ninth marched past

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with ears shattering, dim in resplendent waves of color, and
expressing the English temperament of reserved force and intelligent determination,
with to the more analytical observer a suggestion of brutal
power in their sturdy and inelastic tramp. And then came
the people of the earth, from the ends of the world.

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They came the wild, the exotic, the uncouth, the suave
and treacherous, the mystic, the benign, the terrible, in all garbs,
in vestures of wool and silk and cotton, in no
small numbers, without much vesture. It was a web of hues,

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a carpet of figures and dyes, a lithe and sinuous
and portentous living worm, each zone of its immense length
as it swayed and twisted and halted, and then slipped
on with ludicrous indecision and disorder, made up of races,
ethnic blotches or flowers from the round prolific globe. The

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army had been history. The procession now became psychological, a
review of temperaments, endowments, climates, proclivities, and talents. Nay, it
wore the aspect of a zoological medley, a vast menagerie
of animal products that, with growl and scream, trumpetings or
fluttering wings, gave to the conjuries of men and women

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who walked among them or with them, the sentiment and
resemblance of the parade of the beasts before Adam. As
if with England's dislodgement, the shaken countries of the Earth
emptied out their populations in her wake, disturbed in all
their resting places by her calamity, spilled from their hidden

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corners into the shining light of day, and ringing with
them the animals of the fields, and the birds of
the air, and the air itself was cruelly brilliant. The
severity of outlawe, the sharp shadows, the nipping frostiness in
the shades where the sun was not found, told the
weary story that England had lost her climate and was

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swept back in a normal alignment with the cold and
feeble countries of the Pole. What is this odd group
accentuated in the midst of all this confusion of types
by a more bizarre strangeness, the quizzical fatuity and sippering
idiocy of devotion, Grinning Shikaris from the Tibet with prayer wheels,

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from the lofty valleys of Baltistan and Ladakh, from Kargil
and Malba Chamba, incredible children from the East with their
rotating brass wheels, with a woman or so proudly walking
among them, carrying a burden of wealth in her turquoise
and Carnelian encrusted berrick bound round her head and terminating

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in a black knotted fringe behind her neck. And straggling
on their tracks. Come the Malays from Penang, and Lindings
from Malacca and Singapore, the small brown men enduring, bright eyed,
straight black haired, and jackets and trousers and sarongs, the
tartan skirt fastened around the waist and reaching to the knee,

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and with a rajah sprinkled among them, with a yellow
umbrella over him dandie nonchalance, printing his sleep cheek with dimples.
And India, the nursery of religions, of dreams, of talking
and sleeping and famishing men followed, and for an instant
lay a craft thought of Kim's journey from Umbala, through

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Kalka and the Pinjor gardens nearby, up to Simla, which
Kipling told, he thought on the flush of the morning,
laid along the distant snows, the branched cacti tyr upon tier,
the stony hillsides, the voices of a thousand and water channels,
the chatter of monkeys, the solemn naodars climbing one after

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another with down drooped branches, the vista of the plains
rolled far out beneath them, the incessant twanging of the
tonga horns, and the wild rush of the lead horses,
the halt for prayers, the evening conference by the halting places,
when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together. He closed his

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eyes in a reverie, and the next opened them upon
the very thing. Here were the bullocks, the monkeys, the camels.
Here too came the hulking elephants, Dravidians from the southern
peninsula in shawls, the hill tribes in coats, the high
caste Hindoos in skirts and turbans, musselmen from Cashmere, and

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a few Indian princes with their sweets in a coruscation
of gemstones made up a train of spectacles that drew
the ear eager crowds together, almost to the obliteration of
the narrow string of exotics that a little shabbily shuffled
along between them with, however, the princes on horseback or

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swung in state in Palankin's end of Chapter nine, Part one,