tremendous cut at the point of the neck, which his opponent skilfully
parries and replies to by a thrust._) Never ... (_rapidly parrying a
sharp succession of thrusts that follow from his opponent_) never ...
thrust ... with a light cavalry sword.... I don't know much about (Ah,
you missed that!)--much about ... this business. But---- (_He suddenly
gets round inside_ METRIS' _guard, but has the misfortune to
cut with a spent blow into nothing better than cloth. They disengage._)
METRIS. Sir, you play well enough for a man who is
uninstructed, but I warn you you are depending upon luck.
BOUTROUX. I know that. Luckily for me my mind is divided, and
I can form no plan. For these animals at the end of the snaffle-rein
have nearly pulled my arm off. However, let us have a second bout. The
great thing for men like me is not to plan too much. (_Voices are heard
through the fog._) Sir, let me warn you like a gentleman, though my
father is but a grocer, and yours for all I know a Rouge Dragon, that I
hear the voice of one who is most indubitably my Colonel. And talking
of _his_ profession, he was, at the outbreak of this regrettable
campaign, a butcher in Toulouse. He is a very brutal man, but I will
not detain you, for your time is short.
METRIS. This is more than I will stand. (_They engage, and_
METRIS, _whose blood is now up and who means business, gets_
BOUTROUX _with a slash on the cheek at the third pass_.)
THE COLONEL (_now apparent through the thick fog, with a group
of misty figures behind him_). Do I interrupt you, gentlemen?
BOUTROUX (_with great respect_). My Colonel, I had the
misfortune to be separated from my troop during the fog, but I have
taken this man (_pointing at the Austrian with his sword_) prisoner,
but only after a sharp passage of arms, during which, my Colonel, I
have been wounded. (_He points to the scratch on his cheek._)
COLONEL (_coldly_). Lieutenant Boutroux, you shall have forty
days. (_He turns to a soldier._) Undo that scrimmage of bridles. (_The
soldier obeys him. He turns to_ METRIS _with great courtesy_.)
I take it, sir, you are an officer in the forces of the Emperor and
that you hold his commission?
METRIS. Undoubtedly.
COLONEL. Then, sir, you will follow me, for I take it you
constitute yourself my prisoner. (_Turning to an officer upon his
right._) Major Clement, you will see to the enforcement of my sentence
upon Lieutenant Boutroux. Pray add upon the record that he jested
with a superior officer when discovered, separated from his command,
fencing with a member of the enemy's forces. The Brigadier may deal
with the complaint as he chooses.
BOUTROUX. Upon my soul, the longer I follow it, the less I
comprehend the career of arms!
THE SPANIARD
When I was in the French Army I met many men who had a constant
tradition of the military past. These were not in the regiment, but
one came across them in the garrison town where we were quartered,
and among others there was an old man whose father had fought in
the Peninsula and who retained a very vivid family memory of those
wars. From this old man I gathered in particular what I had learned
in general from reading, an impression of the Spaniard as a soldier,
but that impression was false. It was false for many reasons, but
chiefly for this: that Spain, like the United Kingdom, is very highly
differentiated indeed, and province differs from province to an extent
hardly ever grasped by those who have never visited the country.
When, many years later, I had the opportunity to visit Spain, this
was the first point I noticed. It is particularly striking in the
mountains. You will find yourself with one type of man talking Catalan
in some small modern village; the way in which he tills his garden,
the way in which his house is built, and the way in which he bargains
with you, are all native to his race. You set off over the hills and
by evening you come to another village more different than is a Welsh
village from an English one, for you have crossed from Catalonia into
Aragon. Then, again, the boundary of the Basque Provinces, or at least
of the Basque race, is as clean as a cut with a knife. One may argue
indefinitely whether this is because the Basques have preferred the
peculiar climate and soil of their inhabitance or whether it is their
energy and tenacity which have changed the earth, but there it is. The
Basque is much more separate from the people around him than is even
(if he will pardon my saying so) the Irishman of the West from the
Scotchman of the Lothians.
There is another form of differentiation in Spain which is so striking
that I hesitate for adjectives to describe it lest those adjectives
should seem excessive; but I will say this, it is more striking than
the contrast between the oasis and the desert in Africa, and that is
pretty strong. I mean the differentiation produced by the sudden change
from the high plateaux to the sea-plains. The word "sea-plains" is
not strictly accurate, the belt running back from the Mediterranean
sometimes looks like a plain, sometimes like an enclosed valley, more
often it is a system of terraces, hills upon hills, but at any rate
when you are once out of the influence of the sea and on to the high
plateaux which form, as it were, the body of the Spanish square, you
pass from luxuriance to sterility, from ease to hardship, and from the
man who is always willing to smile to the stoic.
Then, again, you have the contrast between Andalusia and everything
to the north of Andalusia. Andalusia was the very wealthy part of
Spain under the Romans. It must always remain the very wealthy part of
Spain so far as agriculture is concerned. It has easy communications
and a climate like nothing on earth. Therefore, when the Moors came
there they found a large, active, and instructed Christian population,
and they ruined Andalusia less than any other part of Spain. Nay, in
some odd (and not very pleasant) way they married the Asiatic to the
European, and the European solidity, the European power over stone,
the European sense of a straight line, were in Andalusia used by the
vague imagination of the Asiatic to his own purpose, with marvellous
results. All this has produced a quite distinct type of man; and it
is remarkable that, as is to be found in so many similar cases in
Europe, the people exactly limitrophous to Andalusia on the north are
peculiarly sparse, impoverished and alone. There lies the wide and arid
sweep of La Mancha, imperishable in European letters.
Now, having said so much as to this high differentiation of the Spanish
people (and one could add much more: the Asturias, always unconquered;
the Atlantic tides and rivers, the tideless Eastern harbours, the
curious poverty of Estremadura; the French experiments of Madrid and
its neighbourhood, so utterly ill-fitted to the climate and the genius
of Spain), let me say something of the Spanish unity.
No nation in Europe is so united. By which I do not mean that no other
nation is so homogeneous, even in those deep things which escape
superficial differentiation. The Spaniard is united to the Spaniard
by the three most powerful bonds that can bind man to man--religion,
historical memory, isolation. It is not to be admitted by any careful
traveller that the religious emotion of the modern Spaniard is either
combative or profound. Indeed, I know of nothing more remarkable
than the passage from Spanish to French thought in this respect. You
leave, let us say, Huesca; you notice at the morning Mass a moving and
somewhat small concourse of worshippers, few communicants, but above
all in the temper of the place, in the written stuff of the somewhat
belated newspapers, a sort of indifference; as though the things of the
soul "muddled through." You bicycle a long day to Canfranc, the next
day you are over the hills (and Lord! what hills), and there you are in
the seething vat of the great French quarrel. From the little villages
right up to the majestic capital, Toulouse, you feel the pulsation
increasing. Religion and its enemies are there at war. The thing is
vital, and men are quite ready to die on either side. Of this, I say,
you find little or nothing in Spain; nevertheless, religion does bind
the Spaniard to the Spaniard, and it binds him firmly to his kind. For
the very fact that there is so little opposition, while it produces
so much indifference, produces also a singular national contempt; and
every man speaking to every other man knows with precision how that
man's mind stands upon the ultimate things, how careless he is and yet
how secure.
Again, the Spaniards are united by that profound historical memory
which is a necessity to all nations and a peculiar asset in those
who retain it alive. We in this country feel the appetite for an
historical memory; we attempt to satisfy that appetite by the creation
of legends; we call ourselves "Anglo-Saxons"--there is even, I believe,
a notable body which will have us descended from the ten Lost Tribes.
The French satisfy that appetite by recurrent experiences: the reign
of the Grand Monarque, the Revolution, 1870. Glorious or tragic, each
national experience gives a new impetus to the historic memory of the
French people. Not so the Spaniard. All Spain is bound together by
the enormous recollection of the Reconquista. Here is a province in
which the Faith and the Roman Order were not recovered by persuasion
(as was the case with Britain) nor were utterly lost (as was the case
with Africa for so long) but were got back mile by mile as the prize
of hard fighting. That fighting was, so to speak, the very trade of
the Spaniards, from the time when Charlemagne was a little boy to the
time when Henry VIII was a little boy. All the story of our European
growth, the time when we were made, the time which is to the French
the accomplishment of their unity, to the English the foundation of
their institutions, to the Italians the development of their art,
that to the Spaniard is the story of the Reconquista. And the Middle
Ages, which have impressed themselves upon every European nation as
the glorious transition of youth impresses itself upon the sad memory
of a man, stand to the Spaniard for the Reconquista. This has nothing
to do with his knowledge of names or with what is called "Education."
It is in the blood. The best proof of its result is this, that the
Englishman invariably says of the Spaniard that, while other nations
show differences of manner changing from class to class, the Spaniard
is always a "gentleman." The word "gentleman" is a very meagre word,
but on the whole the man who uses it best means the tradition of the
Middle Ages, and especially of the fighting men which the Middle Ages
produced, and the Spaniard everywhere shows the external qualities of
those men. For instance, you cannot insult him with impunity, and that
characteristic, though we often write it down, is one which in other
nations is somewhat rare. Take the modern for all in all, and outside
Spain, if you insult him he will usually argue.
Finally, the Spaniards are bound together by their isolation. From the
Straits of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, different as province is from
province, you feel everywhere something quite separate from that which
lies north of the Pyrenees, and from the Pyrenees on, all over the west
of Europe. Roads are an exception, paths the rule; the hours of meals,
the very habit in the wearing of the clothes, the form of salutation,
the mule taking the place of the horse, the perceptible restraint in
every kind of converse, all these mark out the harsh soil which lends
a perpetual note of nobility to the story of Europe. No man who has
known Spain but would be able to say, if he were taken there blindfold,
and suddenly shown his surroundings, "This is Spain." The frontier is
sharp, the division clear, the isolation absolute.
The limits of these few pages forbid me a thousand things in this
respect. I wish I could describe (for instance) how there is in every
Spanish building, from the least to the greatest, something at once
severe and strange. Bowling into that great harbour of Barcelona one
sees the Customs House, a building with wings. Coming over the northern
slopes of the Guadarrama one sees Segovia sailing out in some immortal
way as though the cathedral and palace intended to attempt the air.
Spain lives, and will revive by such imaginations.
It should be added, by way of closing these few notes, that the Spanish
man is not only silent (which is perhaps a fault in him) but square,
and so healthy in his limbs and in his mind that when he is rested and
can speak again something will be changed in Europe.
THE FORTRESS
There is a province of Europe where a dead plain stretches out upon
every side. It is not very extended if you judge by the map alone, it
is perhaps but twenty-five or thirty miles from its centre to either
of its boundary ranges; but to the eye it seems infinite, for it
lies under that grey weather of the North in which the imagination
exaggerates distance and so easily conceives imaginary flatnesses
extending everywhere beyond the mist of the horizon.
In the midst of this plain there rises most abruptly a little market
town. It stands upon a conical hill some 300 feet in height, and the
impression it gives of being a rock or an island is enhanced by the
height of its buildings, which, as is the case with nearly all mediæval
work, are designed for a general effect, and are, whether consciously
or unconsciously, as well planned and grouped as though one artist had
sketched the whole and had left an inviolable design to posterity.
In this little town I had business some years ago to stop for the
night, and when the next morning I found that there were two hours
between my breakfast and my train I walked out on to the crest of
the hill to see the view and to think about the past. It was autumn;
the many artificially aligned trees which bordered the winding,
deserted avenues all round the edge of the height were losing their
leaves; the air was singularly clear, and the effect of the small but
isolated height upon which one stood was very strong. I came to the
north-eastern corner of the huge ramparts which still surround the
little place, and there I found a most interesting man. He was upon the
border between what are called now-a-days middle age and old age; that
is, he was an old man, and if he lived would soon be a very old man.
He was erect and spare; he was short, and he had all the bearing of a
man who has been perpetually trained, and, indeed, I found out when I
got to know him better that he had seen service in Africa and in Russia
and in Mexico, three very distant places. He had never, however, risen
beyond the rank of colonel; he was a gunner, and exceedingly poor,
and he was finishing his life alone in this little town. They gave
him meals at the hotel for a sum agreed upon between them. Where he
lodged he did not choose to tell me, but I fancy in some very cheap and
ruinous little room under one of the big Flemish roofs of the place.
His only pleasure was to take these walks about the town, to read his
newspaper before it was twenty-four hours old, and to remember the
trade in which he had been engaged.
We sat together on the very edge of the rampart, and I asked him, since
it was his business to know so much about these things, whether the
place would ever in his opinion enter once again into the scheme of
European war.
He told me that this was absolutely certain; he said there was no field
so small nor no village so forgotten, but in its cycle was swept by
one or other of those armies which the peoples of Europe send out one
against the other, pursuing various ends. This little town in which
we sat had never seen an enemy for over two hundred years; yet there
beneath us was the enormous evidence of its past. The trench was like a
street fifty feet or sixty feet deep, as the house fronts of a street
are, as wide at least as the narrow streets of any of these old towns,
and on the further side the enormous heap of earth, and beyond it the
level descent of the glacis. Here was a town not larger than some of
our smaller English cathedral towns, Ely for instance, yet having round
it such a mighty effort and proof of military determination as would
to-day seem worthy of a great city. These fortifications ran all round
the place, the two only gates in and out of it (through which ran the
great road which linked the stronghold with the capital) were flanked
by such works as the great modern forts occasionally show, and upon
every point of its circumference one perceived the fixed will of a
crushing Government responsible for all the destinies of a nation that
this place should be inviolable.
My companion said to me: "Many men choose many things as their examples
of the way in which nothing human can remain, and to most men the best
example is the change of taste in art or letters. They point out how
great buildings put up with infinite care by men who loved them with
all their souls seem tawdry to an immediate posterity; and they wonder
why verse which was supreme in their childhood is ridiculed in their
old age. But to me the most formidable proof of our futility is to be
found in works such as these. They succeed each other all over Europe.
Long before our written record began you have the Cyclopæan Wars; what
you can see in Tuscany and further east in the Mediterranean. You have
the Roman entrenchments, and the mediæval castles, and the new system
of Vauban which the Italians created, and of which this earthquake
before us is the finest work. And each in its turn bears on into its
future the stamp of futility. Something changes in man: he makes a new
weapon (or he forgets the old), he develops a new method of attack
or a different mood in connection with war; nay, his very desires in
the matter of victory change, for he will desire in one generation
glory, and in another profit, and in a third the mere occupation of a
particular piece of sacred land. And as these human things change in
him, so the fortification of his cities become like garments out of
fashion and are useless for their purpose and are thrown aside."
"You might then say," said I, "that those who fortify to-day are
foolish; and, for that matter, you might add that those who have
fortified in the past were foolish. For since each in turn is proved to
be wrong with regard to the future, each generation might have spared
itself this enormous labour."
"You are right when you call it enormous labour," said he, "but you
are wrong when you say that it was ever futile. What a labour it is
only those know who have looked closely into and meditated upon the
fortifications of the past. The chalk hills and ramparts thrown up
upon them by men perhaps who could use no spade and who depended
for carriage upon baskets, which we to-day, when we estimate them
in a modern method, reckon in fantastic sums of money; and this was
done to defend, we know not what, by men every record of whom has
perished. The ancient walls of the cities are much the largest and the
strongest buildings they can boast, and much the most enduring. The
transformation of a city two hundred years ago and more, when hardly a
frontier place of Europe but had its elaborate system of main and out
works, proves the same labour. Consider little Bayonne, never other
than a little town, and yet flanked with a work which must have meant
more than the building of a modern railway. And then, lastly, consider
to-day the great garrisons circled with forts: Spezia and Metz, and the
French frontier garrisons, and Antwerp and the line of the Meuse. And
even, at the far ends of the world, Port Arthur, which, though it was
never finished, was to have been among the greatest of all. Yes, it is
a toil if you like, and that is why those who court defeat by boasting
shirk it or ridicule it."
"But they are right to ridicule it," said I, "since time itself
ridicules the walls of a city, and since it can be shown that no city
has been made impregnable."
"You use a false argument," he insisted; "it is as though you were
to say that because all men die therefore no man should live. These
trenches and these walls and these circles of isolated forts to-day
procure for men who fight under their shoulder a draft upon Time. That
is what fortification is, and that is why all who have ever understood
the art of war have fortified; and all who, upon the contrary, have in
one way or another failed to understand the art of war, whether because
they secretly desired to avoid arms or whether because they believed
themselves invincible (which is the most unmilitary mood in the world!)
have failed to fortify."
"I have heard it said," I answered him, "in the schools where such
things are taught, that the Romans, as they were the chief masters of
war, were also the most plodding in the use of the spade, and that not
only would they fortify permanently every military post, but that they
cast up a square fieldwork round them every night, wherever the army
rested."
The little spare old gunner shrugged his shoulders. "They would have
found it awkward," he said, "to do that in the case of a single
battery quartered during manoeuvres in a country house. But in general
you are right: the Romans, who were the great masters of the art of
war, thought of the spade and of the sword as of twin brothers, only
the sword was the more noble, and in a fashion the elder of the two.
At any rate, certainly those who are in the tradition of the Romans
perpetually fortify...." Then he asked me abruptly: "Since you are a
foreigner and since you say that you have travelled (for I had told him
of my travels when we made acquaintance), have you not noticed that
wherever men are boastful or inept they despise fortifications, and
that it is absent, and that the bases of their military action, their
depots, their political centres, their harbours and dockyards lie open?"
"I cannot tell," I answered, "for I have no knowledge of such things."
"Well, you find it is so," he said, and he walked away. He was much
ruder and more long-winded than if he had been in the Cavalry, but you
cannot have everything at once.
THE HUNTER
One day I had occasion to travel, at the expense of a fund more or
less public, and certainly collective, in a railway train of which the
carriages were _wagons-de-luxe_. It was by its description a train for
the Very Rich, yet few of that numerous class were travelling in it,
for it was going in the depth of winter from one of the most desolate
highlands of Europe to another of Europe's most offensive deserts. I
had business with one and the other.
There was in the dining-car of this luxurious train a gentleman who sat
opposite me. He was dressed, as are so many of his class, in boots and
striped trousers and a black coat and waistcoat. He had on a quiet tie
of grey silk and what is called upon the Continent an English collar.
He was nearly bald, but his eyes were determined, and his moustaches
were of the shape and seemed to be of the size of buffalo's horns. They
were of a metallic colour and looked like steel.