A Book of Golden Deeds

C >> Charlotte M. Yonge >> A Book of Golden Deeds

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In that same year (1804) the same daring endurance and heroism were
evinced by the officers of H.M.S. Hindostan, where, when on the way from
Gibraltar to join Nelson's fleet at Toulon, the cry of 'Fire!' was
heard, and dense smoke rose from the lower decks, so as to render it
nearly impossible to detect the situation of the fire. Again and again
Lieutenants Tailour and Banks descended, and fell down senseless from
the stifling smoke; then were carried on deck, recovered in the free
air, and returned to vain endeavor of clearing the powder-room. But no
man could long preserve his faculties in the poisonous atmosphere, and
the two lieutenants might be said to have many deaths from it. At last
the fire gained so much head, that it was impossible to save the vessel,
which had in the meantime been brought into the Bay of Rosas, and was
near enough to land to enable the crew to escape in boats, after having
endured the fire six hours. Nelson himself wrote: 'The preservation of
the crew seems little short of a miracle. I never read such a journal of
exertions in my life.'

Eight years after, on the taking of Ciudad Rodrigo, in 1812, by the
British army under Wellington, Captain William Jones, of the 52nd
Regiment, having captured a French officer, employed his prisoner in
pointing out quarters for his men. The Frenchman could not speak
English, and Captain Jones--a fiery Welshman, whom it was the fashion in
the regiment to term 'Jack Jones'--knew no French; but dumb show
supplied the want of language, and some of the company were lodged in a
large store pointed out by the Frenchman, who then led the way to a
church, near which Lord Wellington and his staff were standing. But no
sooner had the guide stepped into the building than he started back,
crying, 'Sacre bleu!' and ran out in the utmost alarm. The Welsh
captain, however, went on, and perceived that the church had been used
as a powder-magazine by the French; barrels were standing round, samples
of their contents lay loosely scattered on the pavement, and in the
midst was a fire, probably lighted by some Portuguese soldiers.
Forthwith Captain Jones and the sergeant entered the church, took up the
burning embers brand by brand, bore them safe over the scattered powder,
and out of the church, and thus averted what might have been the most
terrific disaster that could have befallen our army. [Footnote: The
story has been told with some variation, as to whether it was the embers
or a barrel of powder that he and the sergeant removed. In the Record
of the 52d it is said to have been the latter; but the tradition the
author has received from officers of the regiment distinctly stated that
it was the burning brands, and that the scene was a reserve magazine--
not, as in the brief mention in Sir William Napier's History, the great
magazine of the town.]

Our next story of this kind relates to a French officer, Monsieur
Mathieu Martinel, adjutant of the 1st Cuirassiers. In 1820 there was a
fire in the barracks at Strasburg, and nine soldiers were lying sick and
helpless above a room containing a barrel of gunpowder and a thousand
cartridges. Everyone was escaping, but Martinel persuaded a few men to
return into the barracks with him, and hurried up the stairs through
smoke and flame that turned back his companions. He came alone to the
door of a room close to that which contained the powder, but found it
locked. Catching up a bench, he beat the door in, and was met by such a
burst of fire as had almost driven him away; but, just as he was about
to descend, he thought that, when the flames reached the powder, the
nine sick men must infallibly be blown up, and returning to the charge,
he dashed forward, with eyes shut, through the midst, and with face,
hands, hair, and clothes singed and burnt, he made his way to the
magazine, in time to tear away, and throw to a distance from the powder,
the mass of paper in which the cartridges were packed, which was just
about to ignite, and appearing at the window, with loud shouts for
water, thus showed the possibility of penetrating to the magazine, and
floods of water were at once directed to it, so as to drench the powder,
and thus save the men.

This same Martinel had shortly before thrown himself into the River Ill,
without waiting to undress, to rescue a soldier who had fallen in, so
near a water mill, that there was hardly a chance of life for either.
Swimming straight towards the mill dam, Martinel grasped the post of the
sluice with one arm, and with the other tried to arrest the course of
the drowning man, who was borne by a rapid current towards the mill
wheel; and was already so far beneath the surface, that Martinel could
not reach him without letting go of the post. Grasping the inanimate
body, he actually allowed himself to be carried under the mill wheel,
without loosing his hold, and came up immediately after on the other
side, still able to bring the man to land, in time for his suspended
animation to be restored.

Seventeen years afterwards, when the regiment was at Paris, there was,
on the night of the 14th of June, 1837, during the illuminations at the
wedding festival of the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, one of those
frightful crushes that sometimes occur in an ill-regulated crowd, when
there is some obstruction in the way, and there is nothing but a
horrible blind struggling and trampling, violent and fatal because of
its very helplessness and bewilderment. The crowd were trying to leave
the Champ de Mars, where great numbers had been witnessing some
magnificent fireworks, and had blocked up the passage leading out by the
Military College. A woman fell down in a fainting fit, others stumbled
over her, and thus formed an obstruction, which, being unknown to those
in the rear, did not prevent them from forcing forward the persons in
front, so that they too were pushed and trodden down into one frightful,
struggling, suffocating mass of living and dying men, women, and
children, increasing every moment.

M. Martinel was passing, on his way to his quarters, when, hearing the
tumult, he ran to the gate from the other side, and meeting the crowd
tried by shouts and entreaties to persuade them to give back, but the
hindmost could not hear him, and the more frightened they grew, the more
they tried to hurry home, and so made the heap worse and worse, and in
the midst an illuminated yew-tree, in a pot, was upset, and further
barred the way. Martinel, with imminent danger to himself, dragged out
one or two persons; but finding his single efforts almost useless among
such numbers, he ran to the barracks, sounded to horse, and without
waiting till his men could be got together, hurried off again on foot,
with a few of his comrades, and dashed back into the crowd, struggling
as vehemently to penetrate to the scene of danger, as many would have
done to get away from it.

Private Spenlee alone kept up with him, and, coming to the dreadful
heap, these two labored to free the passage, lift up the living, and
remove the dead. First he dragged out an old man in a fainting fit, then
a young soldier, next a boy, a woman, a little girl--he carried them to
freer air, and came back the next moment, though often so nearly pulled
down by the frantic struggles of the terrified stifled creatures, that
he was each moment in the utmost peril of being trampled to death. He
carried out nine persons one by one; Spenlee brought out a man and a
child; and his brother officers, coming up, took their share. One
lieutenant, with a girl in a swoon in his arms, caused a boy to be put
on his back, and under this double burthen was pushing against the crowd
for half and hour, till at length he fell, and was all but killed.

A troop of cuirassiers had by this time mounted, and through the Champ
de Mars came slowly along, step by step, their horses moving as gently
and cautiously as if they knew their work. Everywhere, as they advanced,
little children were held up to them out of the throng to be saved, and
many of their chargers were loaded with the little creatures, perched
before and behind the kind soldiers. With wonderful patience and
forbearance, they managed to insert themselves and their horses, first
in single file, then two by two, then more abreast, like a wedge, into
the press, until at last they formed a wall, cutting off the crowd
behind from the mass in the gateway, and thus preventing the encumbrance
from increasing. The people came to their senses, and went off to other
gates, and the crowd diminishing, it became possible to lift up the many
unhappy creatures, who lay stifling or crushed in the heap. They were
carried into the barracks, the cuirassiers hurried to bring their
mattresses to lay them on in the hall, brought them water, linen, all
they could want, and were as tender to them as sisters of charity, till
they were taken to the hospitals or to their homes. Martinel, who was
the moving spirit in this gallant rescue, received in the following year
one of M. Monthyon's prizes for the greatest acts of virtue that could
be brought to light.

Nor among the gallant actions of which powder has been the cause should
be omitted that of Lieutenant Willoughby, who, in the first dismay of
the mutiny in India, in 1858, blew up the great magazine at Delhi, with
all the ammunition that would have armed the sepoys even yet more
terribly against ourselves. The 'Golden Deed' was one of those capable
of no earthly meed, for it carried the brave young officer where alone
there is true reward; and all the Queen and country could do in his
honor was to pension his widowed mother, and lay up his name among those
that stir the heart with admiration and gratitude.

HEROES OF THE PLAGUE

1576--1665--1721

When our Litany entreats that we may be delivered from 'plague,
pestilence, and famine', the first of these words bears a special
meaning, which came home with strong and painful force to European minds
at the time the Prayer Book was translated, and for the whole following
century.

It refers to the deadly sickness emphatically called 'the plague', a
typhoid fever exceedingly violent and rapid, and accompanied with a
frightful swelling either under the arm or on the corresponding part of
the thigh. The East is the usual haunt of this fatal complaint, which
some suppose to be bred by the marshy, unwholesome state of Egypt after
the subsidence of the waters of the Nile, and which generally prevails
in Egypt and Syria until its course is checked either by the cold of
winter or the heat in summer. At times this disease has become unusually
malignant and infectious, and then has come beyond its usual boundaries
and made its way over all the West. These dreadful visitations were
rendered more frequent by total disregard of all precautions, and
ignorance of laws for preserving health. People crowded together in
towns without means of obtaining sufficient air or cleanliness, and thus
were sure to be unhealthy; and whenever war or famine had occasioned
more than usual poverty, some frightful epidemic was sure to follow in
its train, and sweep away the poor creatures whose frames were already
weakened by previous privation. And often this 'sore judgment' was that
emphatically called the plague; and especially during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, a time when war had become far more cruel and
mischievous in the hands of hired regiments than ever it had been with a
feudal army, and when at the same time increasing trade was filling the
cities with more closely packed inhabitants, within fortifications that
would not allow the city to expand in proportion to its needs. It has
been only the establishment of the system of quarantine which has
succeeded in cutting off the course of infection by which the plague was
wont to set out on its frightful travels from land to land, from city to
city.

The desolation of a plague-stricken city was a sort of horrible dream.
Every infected house was marked with a red cross, and carefully closed
against all persons, except those who were charged to drive carts
through the streets to collect the corpses, ringing a bell as they went.
These men were generally wretched beings, the lowest and most reckless
of the people, who undertook their frightful task for the sake of the
plunder of the desolate houses, and wound themselves up by intoxicating
drinks to endure the horrors. The bodies were thrown into large
trenches, without prayer or funeral rites, and these were hastily closed
up. Whole families died together, untended save by one another, with no
aid of a friendly hand to give drink or food; and, in the Roman Catholic
cities, the perishing without a priest to administer the last rites of
the Church was viewed as more dreadful than death itself.

Such visitations as these did indeed prove whether the pastors of the
afflicted flock were shepherds or hirelings. So felt, in 1576, Cardinal
Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, the worthiest of all the successors
of St. Ambrose, when he learnt at Lodi that the plague had made its
appearance in his city, where, remarkably enough, there had lately been
such licentious revelry that he had solemnly warned the people that,
unless they repented, they would certainly bring on themselves the wrath
of heaven. His council of clergy advised him to remain in some healthy
part of his diocese till the sickness should have spent itself, but he
replied that a Bishop, whose duty it is to give his life for his sheep,
could not rightly abandon them in time of peril. They owned that to
stand by them was the higher course. 'Well,' he said, 'is it not a
Bishop's duty to choose the higher course?'

So back into the town of deadly sickness he went, leading the people to
repent, and watching over them in their sufferings, visiting the
hospitals, and, by his own example, encouraging his clergy in carrying
spiritual consolation to the dying. All the time the plague lasted,
which was four months, his exertions were fearless and unwearied, and
what was remarkable was, that of his whole household only two died, and
they were persons who had not been called to go about among the sick.
Indeed, some of the rich who had repaired to a villa, where they spent
their time in feasting and amusement in the luxurious Italian fashion,
were there followed by the pestilence, and all perished; their dainty
fare and the excess in which they indulged having no doubt been as bad a
preparation as the poverty of the starving people in the city.

The strict and regular life of the Cardinal and his clergy, and their
home in the spacious palace, were, no doubt, under Providence, a
preservative; but, in the opinions of the time, there was little short
of a miracle in the safety of one who daily preached in the cathedral,--
bent over the beds of the sick, giving them food and medicine, hearing
their confessions, and administering the last rites of the Church,--and
then braving the contagion after death, rather than let the corpses go
forth unblest to their common grave. Nay, so far was he from seeking to
save his own life, that, kneeling before the altar in the cathedral, he
solemnly offered himself, like Moses, as a sacrifice for his people.
But, like Moses, the sacrifice was passed by--'it cost more to redeem
their souls'--and Borromeo remained untouched, as did the twenty-eight
priests who voluntarily offered themselves to join in his labors.

No wonder that the chief memories that haunt the glorious white marble
cathedral of Milan are those of St. Ambrose, who taught mercy to an
emperor, and of St. Carlo Borromeo, who practiced mercy on a people.

It was a hundred years later that the greatest and last visitation of
the plague took place in London. Doubtless the scourge called forth--as
in Christian lands such judgments always do--many an act of true and
blessed self-devotion; but these are not recorded, save where they have
their reward: and the tale now to be told is of one of the small
villages to which the infection spread--namely, Eyam, in Derbyshire.

This is a lovely place between Buxton and Chatsworth, perched high on a
hillside, and shut in by another higher mountain--extremely beautiful,
but exactly one of those that, for want of free air, always become the
especial prey of infection. At that time lead works were in operation in
the mountains, and the village was thickly inhabited. Great was the
dismay of the villagers when the family of a tailor, who had received
some patterns of cloth from London, showed symptoms of the plague in its
most virulent form, sickening and dying in one day.

The rector of the parish, the Rev. William Mompesson, was still a young
man, and had been married only a few years. His wife, a beautiful young
woman, only twenty-seven years old, was exceedingly terrified at the
tidings from the village, and wept bitterly as she implored her husband
to take her, and her little George and Elizabeth, who were three and
fours years old, away to some place of safety. But Mr. Mompesson gravely
showed her that it was his duty not to forsake his flock in their hour
of need, and began at once to make arrangements for sending her and the
children away. She saw he was right in remaining, and ceased to urge him
to forsake his charge; but she insisted that if he ought not to desert
his flock, his wife ought not to leave him; and she wept and entreated
so earnestly, that he at length consented that she should be with him,
and that only the two little ones should be removed while yet there was
time.

Their father and mother parted with the little ones as treasures that
they might never see again. At the same time Mr. Mompesson wrote to
London for the most approved medicines and prescriptions; and he
likewise sent a letter to the Earl of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, to
engage that his parishioners should exclude themselves from the whole
neighborhood, and thus confine the contagion within their own
boundaries, provided the Earl would undertake that food, medicines, and
other necessaries, should be placed at certain appointed spots, at
regular times, upon the hills around, where the Eyamites might come,
leave payment for them, and take them up, without holding any
communication with the bringers, except by letters, which could be
placed on a stone, and then fumigated, or passed through vinegar, before
they were touched with the hand. To this the Earl consented, and for
seven whole months the engagement was kept.

Mr. Mompesson represented to his people that, with the plague once among
them, it would be so unlikely that they should not carry infection about
with them, that it would be selfish cruelty to other places to try to
escape amongst them, and thus spread the danger. So rocky and wild was
the ground around them, that, had they striven to escape, a regiment of
soldiers could not have prevented them. But of their own free will they
attended to their rector's remonstrance, and it was not known that one
parishoner of Eyam passed the boundary all that time, nor was there a
single case of plague in any of the villages around.

The assembling of large congregations in churches had been thought to
increase the infection in London, and Mr. Mompesson, therefore, thought
it best to hold his services out-of-doors. In the middle of the village
is a dell, suddenly making a cleft in the mountain-side, only five yards
wide at the bottom, which is the pebble bed of a wintry torrent, but is
dry in the summer. On the side towards the village, the slope upwards
was of soft green turf, scattered with hazel, rowan, and alder bushes,
and full of singing birds. On the other side, the ascent was nearly
perpendicular, and composed of sharp rocks, partly adorned with bushes
and ivy, and here and there rising up in fantastic peaks and archways,
through which the sky could be seen from below. One of these rocks was
hollow, and could be entered from above--a natural gallery, leading to
an archway opening over the precipice; and this Mr. Mompesson chose for
his reading-desk and pulpit. The dell was so narrow, that his voice
could clearly be heard across it, and his congregation arranged
themselves upon the green slop opposite, seated or kneeling upon the
grass.

On Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays arose the earnest voice of prayer
from that rocky glen, the people's response meeting the pastor's voice;
and twice on Sundays he preached to them the words of life and hope. It
was a dry, hot summer; fain would they have seen thunder and rain to
drive away their enemy; and seldom did weather break in on the
regularity of these service. But there was another service that the
rector had daily to perform; not in his churchyard--that would have
perpetuated the infection--but on a healthy hill above the village.
There he daily read of 'the Resurrection and the Life', and week by week
the company on the grassy slope grew fewer and scantier. His
congregation were passing from the dell to the healthy mound.

Day and night the rector and his wife were among the sick, nursing,
feeding, and tending them with all that care and skill could do; but, in
spite of all their endeavors, only a fifth part of the whole of their
inhabitants lived to spend the last Sunday in Cucklet Church, as the
dell is still called. Mrs. Mompesson had persuaded her husband to have a
wound made in his leg, fancying that this would lessen the danger of
infection, and he yielded in order to satisfy her. His health endured
perfectly, but she began to waste under her constant exertions, and her
husband feared that he saw symptoms of consumption; but she was full of
delight at some appearances in his wound that made her imagine that it
had carried off the disease, and that his danger was over.

A few days after, she sickened with symptoms of the plague, and her
frame was so weakened that she sank very quickly. She was often
delirious; but when she was too much exhausted to endure the exertion of
taking cordials, her husband entreated her to try for their children's
sake, she lifted herself up and made the endeavor. She lay peacefully,
saying, 'she was but looking for the good hour to come', and calmly
died, making the responses to her husband's prayers even to the last.
Her he buried in the churchyard, and fenced the grave in afterwards with
iron rails. There are two beautiful letters from him written on her
death--one to his little children, to be kept and read when they would
be old enough to understand it; the other to his patron, Sir George
Saville, afterwards Lord Halifax. 'My drooping spirits', he says, 'are
much refreshed with her joys, which I assure myself are unutterable.' He
wrote both these letters in the belief that he should soon follow her,
speaking of himself to Sir George as 'his dying chaplain', commending to
him his 'distressed orphans', and begging that a 'humble pious man'
might be chosen to succeed him in his parsonage. 'Sire, I thank God that
I am willing to shake hands in peace with all the world; and I have
comfortable assurance that He will accept me for the sake of His Son,
and I find God more good than ever I imagined, and wish that his
goodness were not so much abused and contemned', writes the widowed
pastor, left alone among his dying flock. And he concludes, 'and with
tears I entreat that when you are praying for fatherless and motherless
infants, you would then remember my two pretty babes'.

These two letters were written on the last day of August and first of
September, 1666; but on the 20th of November, Mr. Mompesson was writing
to his uncle, in the lull after the storm. 'The condition of this place
hath been so dreadful, that I persuade myself it exceedeth all history
and example. I may truly say our town has become a Golgotha, a place of
skulls; and had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been
as Sodom, and like unto Gomorrah. My ears never heard such doleful
lamentations, my nose never smelt such noisome smells, and my eyes never
beheld such ghastly spectacles. Here have been seventy-six families
visited within my parish, out of which died 259 persons.'

However, since the 11th of October there had been no fresh cases, and he
was now burning all woolen cloths, lest the infection should linger in
them. He himself had never been touched by the complaint, nor had his
maid-servant; his man had had it but slightly. Mr. Mompesson lived many
more years, was offered the Deanery of Lincoln, but did not accept it,
and died in 1708. So virulent was the contagion that, ninety-one years
after, in 1757, when five laboring men, who were digging up land near
the plague- graves for a potato-garden, came upon what appeared to be
some linen, though they buried it again directly, they all sickened with
typhus fever, three of them died, and it was so infectious that no less
than seventy persons in the parish were carried off.

The last of these remarkable visitations of the plague, properly so
called, was at Marseilles, in 1721. It was supposed to have been brought
by a vessel which sailed from Seyde, in the bay of Tunis, on the 31st of
January, 1720, which had a clean bill of health when it anchored off the
Chateau d'If, at Marseilles, on the 25th of May; but six of the crew
were found to have died on the voyage, and the persons who handled the
freight also died, though, it was said, without any symptoms of the
plague, and the first cases were supposed to be of the fevers caused by
excessive poverty and crowding. The unmistakable Oriental plague,
however, soon began to spread in the city among the poorer population,
and in truth the wars and heavy expenses of Louis XIV. had made poverty
in France more wretched than ever before, and the whole country was like
one deadly sore, festering, and by and by to come to a fearful crisis.
Precautions were taken, the infected families were removed to the
infirmaries and their houses walled up, but all this was done at night
in order not to excite alarm. The mystery, however, made things more
terrible to the imagination, and this was a period of the utmost
selfishness. All the richer inhabitants who had means of quitting the
city, and who were the very people who could have been useful there,
fled with one accord. Suddenly the lazaretto was left without
superintendents, the hospitals without stewards; the judges, public
officers, notaries, and most of the superior workmen in the most
necessary trades were all gone. Only the Provost and four municipal
officers remained, with 1,100 livres in their treasury, in the midst of
an entirely disorganized city, and an enormous population without work,
without restraint, without food, and a prey to the deadliest of
diseases.

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