Harold Begbie talking to Bramwell Booth, son of the Salvationist founder, at the 1914 World CongressHarold Begbie
Harold Begbie (born in 1871) was one of the sons of Mars Hamilton Begbie - brother of Alfred Daniel Campbell Begbie and therefore my grandfather Herbert Smirnoff Begbie's cousin. Born and raised in England, Harold became a journalist, author, poet and playwright. His books included political satire, comedy, fiction, science fiction, and studies of the Christian religion. He wrote using his own name and at least three pseudonyms. In the early 1920s, Harold attended meetings of what was later to become the Oxford Group - and began correspondence with the founder Frank Buchman. This led (in 1922) to him personally witnessing the work Buchman was performing with undergraduates at several universities in England. As a result, Begbie authored the book Life Changers, which details lives turned around thanks to Buchman's teachings.
Another of Harold's books, Twice Born Men, is set in the gutters and slums of London. It is a chronicle of the despair caused by poverty, the birth of the Salvation Army and the difference this new movement made to the lives of men and women. One story in the book titled The Puncher tells of a slum youth who idolized prize-fighters and whose life became a drunken mess. Ultimately he was thrown into jail, dead drunk. One Sunday, Harold writes "he was in his cell...mad with the rage of a caged beast...when he heard the sound of the Salvation Army's brass band coming though his cell window." He was released that afternoon, still drunk, but went to the hall where the Salvation Army conducted their services. With tears of remorse, his life began to change.
Harold Begbie hated socialists, divorce, jazz, the rich, current fiction, and women who smoked. He was a harsh critic of high society and of politicians, and thought that the moral tone of both groups was "pitiably low." He wrote for the Daily Chronicle towards the start of the war in 1914. This newspaper was a popular tabloid of the time. Sent to America as a correspondent for the Chronicle, he campaigned while there for America's support during the conflict. But he didn't make his name as a writer until after the war, when he contributed articles to The Pall Mall Magazine under the pseudonym A Gentleman with a Duster who had "come to wipe away the dust and mists that concealed the truth about post-war England." He collected these articles into books.
The Angel of Mons was one of the great myths of the First World War and Begbie wrote about it in a work titled On The Side of the Angels. He recounted the testimony of an officer who described to him, in detail, a sighting of the angel in August 1914 when British forces were fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the Germans. The lieutenant reports watching the angel - or rather angels, because there were three of them ranked together - for over 45 minutes. It was around eight o'clock at night. There was a tall central figure flanked closely by two smaller figures on either side, high above the city of Mons
Begbie's war poetry, some of which can be found in Fighting Lines and Various Reinforcements (Constable: London, 1914) contained a poem that was initially popular but was to become one of the most despised poems of World War I. Martin Stephen (in The Price of Pity) calls it "one of the most revolting poems to have been written during the war" and goes on to say "the poem illustrates the negative pressure applied to those who did not enlist, the fear of being mocked and humiliated."
The jingoistic Fall In was soon to be set to music and played throughout the nation:
FALL IN
What will you lack, sonny, what will you lack,
When the girls line up the street
Shouting their love to the lads to come back
From the foe they rushed to beat?
Will you send a strangled cheer to the sky
And grin till your cheeks are red?
But what will you lack when your mate goes by
With a girl who cuts you dead?
Where will you look, sonny, where will you look,
When your children yet to be
Clamour to learn of the part you took
In the War that kept men free?
Will you say it was naught to you if France
Stood up to her foe or bunked?
But where will you look when they give the glance
That tells you they know you funked?
How will you fare, sonny, how will you fare
In the far-off winter night,
When you sit by the fire in an old man's chair
And your neighbours talk of the fight?
Will you slink away, as it were from a blow,
Your old head shamed and bent?
Or say - I was not with the first to go,
But I went, thank God, I went?
Why do they call, sonny, why do they call
For men who are brave and strong?
Is it naught to you if your country fall,
And Right is smashed by Wrong?
Is it football still and the picture show,
The pub and the betting odds,
When your brothers stand to the tyrant's blow,
And England's call is God's!
Supposedly, by the end of the war, Begbie came to regret his "patriotic" advocacy of war, a change of heart that led to a poem of bitter irony - the antithesis of his earlier poem.
WAR EXALTS
War exalts and cleanses: it lifts man from the mud!
Ask God what He thinks of a bayonet dripping blood.
By War the brave are tested, and cowards are disgraced!
Show God His own image shrapnel'd into paste.
Fight till tyrants perish, slay till brutes are mild!
Then go wash the blood off and try to face your child.
