One of the most unique occasions was the Sunday when I addressed the
3rd Artillery brigade, after church parade in the market square of
Market Lavingdon. We arrived early and sat and listened while, from
the little stone church high up on the hill above us, drifted the
sound of soldiers singing. It was unutterably sad to me to hear the
full mellow soldier chorus swelling out on "Onward Christian Soldiers,
Marching as to War." One felt that the words must have had to all of
them a meaning that they never had had before.
Then the brigade formed up and was played by the village band to the
market place where they were drawn up into a square with some gun
carriages in the centre. When all was ready I mounted a gun carriage
and gave my talk with all the earnestness I could muster, while the
villagers congregated at one side, stood and gaped, and wondered what
it was all about.
My talk had settled down into a 20-minute discourse, and I gave
variations of it as often as four times in an afternoon at places 10
miles apart. In this way one saw a good deal of the Wiltshire scenery
in the late winter season. It was a never-failing source of wonder and
pleasure to me to see the ivy covered banks, the ivy clad trees and
the rhododendrons and holly trees in green leaf in the middle of the
winter. In the garden at the back of the famous old Elizabethan house
in Potterne--a perfect example of the old Tudor timbered style of
architecture--cowslips and pansies were in full blossom, and I was
told the wild violets were in flower in the woods.
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