The earliest human tools were weapons too, mere sticks and stones; and
perhaps the earliest great discovery, before the invention of fire and
in days of infinite antiquity, was the importance of heads.
The value of the discovery was due to the natural weakness of our
limbs and teeth and nails. The other beasts were better provided with
natural weapons and neither needed tools nor made them. The importance
of heads did not concern them at all. The lions and tigers, who are
regularly killing men and cattle in the way of business, do it as we
kill fowls, by a sudden jerk of the neck. They have other ways, but
they seem to like that best, as Homer noticed, and we can see to-day.
_See_ Pope's translation, _Iliad_, v. 206, etc.:
"... When the lordly lion seeks his food
Where grazing heifers range the lonely wood,
He leaps among them with a furious bound,
Bends their strong necks and tears them to the ground...."
That is exactly the principle of the improved drop of the modern
hangman, and swift and painless enough to please the most humane; but
it needs a greatly superior force. The hangman is magnificent; but he
is not war. Herein lay the importance of the discovery that hitting
the head could stun and kill. Thereby the primitive sticks, by which
our long-forgotten ancestors straightened their backs and stiffened
their feeble knees, became clubs; and men began to face the lions in
their path, and other enemies.
But for this great discovery we would have remained as restricted in
diet and outlook as the chimpanzees. Whether tending cattle or
cultivating the ground, men must be ready and able to take the open
field and hold their own against all comers.
Accordingly, we find that the discovery was familiar in the remotest
of recorded times. The wearing of helmets is a fashion as ancient as
civilisation itself. The Rig-Veda Aryans had helmets, and the Homeric
Greeks, and in the ancient classical _Odes_ (iv, 2, 4, 5) a Chinese
poet, perhaps coeval with Homer, tells of a potentate:
"He's thirty thousand men afoot,
Who handsome helmets wear,
With shells and bright vermilion strings
That flutter in the air,"
thus anticipating the "red coats" of England. Indeed, that is not the
only coincidence of old and new. The Homeric chiefs went among their
men, in times of confusion, striking right and left with effective,
home-made sceptres of wood, like modern policemen with their
truncheons. The helmets of the police make the likeness almost
palpable.
In the House of Commons a touching medieval survival is the wearing of
hats. It comes down from the days when the steel-cap clapped on the
head was the first step in a breach of the peace, and the head
uncovered was the silent, unmistakable symbol of the peace-making
speech, the soft words to turn away wrath. Little as he thinks of it,
the member, who takes off his hat and stands up to speak, is led by a
beautiful old custom to assume an attitude such as Themistocles has
been admired for expressing, when violence was offered him in council,
and he said, "Strike, but hear me." Meanwhile, upon the table lies the
unwieldy metal bauble, meant to represent the mace or loaded stick of
the Speaker, who presides and makes no speech, but silently tables his
tool as if intimating, "My voice keeps order and my club gives law."
Every other mace as well as his, and every sceptre and staff of
office, is merely a sophisticated emblem of the original reality,
which is a common stick. The weapons of ancient Egyptians and
Chaldeans are ancient indeed compared to anything in Europe; but they
are modern things, as of yesterday, compared to the cudgel from the
woods. And what is perhaps the most remarkable fact of all, while
fashions change in war-tackle as in ladies' dresses, the primitive
cudgel abides the same; and under primitive conditions it is wielded
to-day by the hands of contemporary men, exactly as it was wielded by
our forefathers, who preceded history so far that, in our books, we
speak of them as "missing." We mean no harm, and we shall, all of us,
be missing some day. So there has always appeared to me to be an
antiquarian interest in what is certainly, for other reasons too, the
best leopard story I know.
In 1886 a Burman farmer was working in his fields, about twenty miles
from Thayetmyo, in Lower Burma, and noticed a leopard seize and carry
away a calf. He picked up a stick and ran after it, shouting and
waving the stick. The leopard saw him and paused and looked at him;
but did not drop its prey, as the man had hoped. He fingered the stick
in his hands, not taking his eyes off the enemy, and felt, to his joy,
that it was a "male bamboo," a bamboo solid inside, a very strong and
formidable cudgel, light enough to handle quickly and heavy enough to
kill a man or stun an ox.
They continued to eye each other askance, he and the leopard. He would
have been happy to see it drop the veal and go. It would have been
well content to depart without hurting him. But to go away supperless
was not its intention, and to let it take away his calf was not his.
It was interesting to study how they had manoeuvred, the leopard
trying to reach cover without approaching the man, and the man to
prevent that, without risking an encounter face to face. This lasted
long. There was plenty of active patience on both sides; and strategy
so admirable that I afterwards regretted that I did not make a plan of
the ground and record it all. At length the leopard ventured a bound
over a bush and the man came within reach of it sideways, and lifting
high his "male bamboo," he dealt his first smashing blow on the skull.
Everything turned on that. To fail to stun the leopard would have been
most dangerous. But he did not fail. He stunned it; and, with a shower
of rapidly-repeated blows, he killed it, and not only saved his veal,
but also earned the twenty rupees reward that is always payable for
killing a leopard. Surely it never was better earned.
I happened to be in charge of the office of the Deputy Commissioner at
Thayetmyo, when he came for his reward, and held the inquiry myself. I
noted the details carefully, because friends in the station, one of
them a veteran who had been a quarter of a century in India, had
nothing to tell to equal it; and, in the twenty-three years that have
passed since then, during which I have heard on the average more than
one leopard anecdote a month, I have never been able to verify
anything so good as this.