he
trenches: "I want to tell you," the widow of a sailor wrote, "that a
copy of the Ballad of the White Horse went down into the Humber with
the R.38. My husband loved it as his own soul--never went anywhere
without it."

Almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks.
Greeting Jacques Maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday,
Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom
against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." After Crete the
_Times_ had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the
heading _Sursum Corda_ was a brief statement of the disaster,
followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread
of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those
dark days; many others wrote to the _Times_ asking the source of the
quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of
the beginning," the _Times_ returned to _The White Horse_ and gave
the opening of Alfred's speech at Ethandune:

"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"

CHAPTER XVII

The Disillusioned Liberal

_The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong
in losing it_.

_G.K.'s Weekly_, June 1, 1933.

ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands
that run through every human life. It is as I have already said
impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose
occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present
chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of
Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve
going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi
Trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his
humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his
sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters
may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them
altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal
that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course
his life was to t