ARTS OF LIFE—(_continued_).
Quest of wild food, 206—Hunting, 207—Trapping, 211—Fishing,
212—Agriculture, 214—Implements, 216—Fields, 218—Cattle,
pasturage, 219—War, 221—Weapons, 221—Armour, 222—Warfare of
lower tribes, 223—of higher nations, 225.
Having, in the last chapter, examined the instruments used by man, we
have next to look at the arts by which he maintains and protects himself.
His first need is to get his daily food. In tropical forests, savages
may easily live on what nature provides, like the Andaman Islanders,
who gather fruits and honey, hunt wild pigs in the jungle, and take
turtle and fish on the coast. Many forest tribes of Brazil, though
they cultivate a little, depend mostly on wild food. Of such the rude
man has no lack, for there is game in plenty and the rivers swarm with
fish, while the woods yield him a supply of roots and bulbs, calabashes,
palm-nuts, beans, and many other fruits; he collects wild honey, birds’
eggs, grubs out of rotten wood, nor does he despise insects, even ants.
In less fertile lands savage life goes on well while game and fish
abound, but when these fail it becomes an unceasing quest for food,
as where the Australians roam over their deserts on the look-out for
every eatable root or insect, or the low Rocky Mountain tribes gather
pine-nuts and berries, catch snakes, and drag lizards out of their holes
with a hooked stick. The Fuegians wander along their bleak inhospitable
shores feeding mostly on shellfish, so that in the course of ages their
shells, with fish-bones and other rubbish, have formed long banks above
high-water mark. Such shell-heaps or “kitchen-middens” are found here and
there all round the coasts of the world, marking the old resorts of such
tribes; for instance on the coast of Denmark, where archæologists search
them for relics of rude Europeans, who, in the Stone age, led a life
somewhat like that of Tierra del Fuego. Hunting and fishing go on through
all levels of society, beginning with the savages who have no other means
of subsistence, till at last among civilized nations game and fish hardly
do more than supplement the more regular supplies of grain and meat from
the farm. Looking at the devices of the hunter and fisher, it will be
seen how thoroughly most of them belong to the ruder stages of culture.
The natives of the Brazilian forests, to whom tracking game is the chief
business of life, do it with a skill that fills with wonder the white
men who have watched them. The Botocudo hunter, gliding stealthily
through the underwood, knows every habit and sign of bird and beast;
the remains of berries and pods show him what creature has fed there;
he knows how high up an armadillo displaces the leaves in passing, and
so can distinguish its track from the snake’s or tortoise’s, and follow
it to its burrow by the scratches of its scaly armour on the mud. Even
the sense of smell of this savage hunter is keen enough to help him in
tracking. Hidden behind the trunk of a tree, he can imitate the cries
of birds and beasts to bring them within range of his deadly poisoned
arrow, and he will even entice the alligator by making her rough eggs
grate together where they lie under leaves on the river-bank. If an ape
he has shot high in the boughs of some immense tree remains hanging by
its tail, he will go up after it by a hanging creeper where no white man
would climb. At last, laden with game and useful forest things, such as
palm-fibre to make hammocks, or fruit to brew liquor, he finds his way
back to his hut by the sun and the lie of the ground, and the twigs that
he bent back for way-marks as he crept through the thicket. In Australia,
the native hunter will lie in wait behind a screen of boughs near a
water-hole till the kangaroos come to drink, or will track one in the
open for days, camping by his little fire at night to be ready for the
pursuit again at dawn, keeping unseen and to the leeward till at last
he can creep near enough to hurl his spear, seldom in vain. When the
natives hunt together, they will put up brush-fence in two long wings
converging towards a pit, and so drive the kangaroos into it; or they
will form a great hunting party for a battue, surrounding half a mile of
bush-land, and with shouts and clatter of weapons driving all the game
to the centre where they can close round and despatch them with spears
and waddies. In fowling the Australians show equal expertness. A native
will swim under water breathing through a reed, or will merely cover his
head with water-weed till he gets among a flock of ducks, which one by
one he noiselessly pulls under and tucks into his belt. This shows in a
simple form a kind of duck-hunting which is found in such distant parts
of the world, that travellers have been puzzled to guess whether the idea
spread from one tribe to another, or was invented many times. It may
be seen on the Nile, where a harmless-looking calabash floats in among
the water-fowl, with a swimming Egyptian’s head inside. The Australian
hunter takes the wallaby (a small kangaroo) by fastening to a long rod
like a fishing-rod a hawk’s skin and feathers, making the sham bird
hover with its proper cry till it drives the game into a bush where it
can be speared. Of devices of stalking with an imitated animal, one of
the most perfect is that of the Dogrib Indians, when a pair of hunters
go after reindeer; the foremost carries a reindeer’s head, while in the
other hand he has a bunch of twigs against which he makes the head rub
its horns in a lifelike way, and the two men, walking as the deer’s fore
and hind legs, get among the herd and bring down the finest. In England,
till of late years, fowlers used to hide behind a wooden horse moved
along on wheels, and a relic of this survives in the phrase “to make a
_stalking-horse_ of one,” often now used by people who have no idea what
the word meant.
Hunting with dogs was very ancient, and was found among uncivilized
tribes; thus the Australians seem to have trained the dingo or native
dog for the chase, and most of the North American Indians had their
native hunting-dogs. Still dogs were not so universal among rude tribes
as they have been since European breeds were carried all over the world;
for instance, the natives of Newfoundland seem to have had no dogs.
The largest and fiercest animal whose instinct of prey man has thus
taken advantage of is the hunting-leopard or cheetah, which in India or
Persia is carried in an iron cage to the field and let loose upon the
deer; when it has pounced on the game the huntsman draws it off with
the taste of blood and gives it a leg for its share in the partnership.
Already in classic times there is mention of birds of prey trained to
strike game-birds or drive them into the net, or to pounce on hares.
Hawking or falconry reached its height as a royal sport in mediæval
Tartary, where Marco Polo describes the Great Khan going out, borne
by two elephants in his litter hung with cloth of gold and covered
with lion-skins, to see the sport of his ten thousand falconers flying
their hawks at the pheasants and cranes. From the East hawking spread
over Europe. It was familiar to our early English ancestors, and if one
had to paint a symbolic picture of the middle ages, one could hardly
choose more characteristic figures than the knight and lady riding out
with their hooded hawks on their fists. Since then falconry has all but
died out in Europe, and nowadays the traveller may best see it in the
Asiatic district where it first came up, Persia or the neighbouring
countries. In such sports the quest of food (now often contemptuously
called “pot-hunting”) becomes subordinate to the excitement of the chase.
It was so especially where fleet animals like the deer were hunted on
horseback, till at last the royal stag-hunt became a court ceremony with
its cavalcades and its great officers of state in splendid uniforms. Such
pageantry is, indeed, declining in modern Europe, but the place it used
to hold in English court life is shown by noblemen still occupying in the
Royal household the places of Master of the Buckhounds and Hereditary
Grand Falconer.
The modern hunter has a vastly increased power of killing game, from the
use of fire-arms instead of the bow and spear which came down from savage
times. The effect of bringing in guns is seen among the native American
buffalo-hunters. They were always reckless in destruction when they once
came within reach of the herds, but now with the help of the white man
and the use of his rifles there is such slaughter that travellers have
found the ground and air for miles foul with the carcases of buffalo
killed merely for the hides and tongues. In the civilized world, what
with killing off game, and what with the encroachment of agriculture
on the wild lands, both the supply and the need of game for man’s
subsistence have much lessened. But the hunter’s life has been from the
earliest times man’s school of endurance and courage, where success and
even trial gives pleasure in one of its intensest forms. Thus it has
come to be kept up artificially where its practical use has fallen away.
In civilized countries it is seen at its best where it keeps closest
to barbaric fatigue and danger, like grouse-shooting in Scotland, or
boar-hunting in Austria, but at its meanest, where it has come down to
shooting grain-fed pheasants as tame as barn-door fowls.
Next, as to trapping game. This was seen in a curiously simple form in
Australia, where a native would lie on his back on a rock in the sunshine
with a bit of fish in his hand, pretending to be fast asleep, till some
hawk or crow pounced on the bait, only to be itself pounced on by the
hungry man, who broiled and ate it then and there. A plan of taking game
which must have readily suggested itself to rude hunters was the pitfall,
in its simplest shape a mere hole too deep for a heavy beast to get out
of when it has fallen in. The savage trapper will dig such a pit, and
cover it with brushwood or sods, as in Africa the bushmen take the huge
hippopotamus and elephant, while in fur-countries the hunters arrange
their pitfalls in various ways, the most artificial plan being to cover
them with a wooden floor which upsets when trodden on. The word _trap_,
meaning originally step (like German _treppe_), may have come from its
usually being some contrivance for the game to tread on. It is so not
only with the pitfall, but with other common kinds of trap, which, when
the animal steps on the catch, drop down on it, or pull a noose round it,
or let fly a dart at it, all which are plans known in the uncivilized
world. The art of catching birds and beasts with a noose, held in the
hand or fastened to the end of a stick, is universal. Perhaps the most
skilful noosing is that done on horseback by the herdsmen of Mexico,
though it should be noticed that their _lazo_ is not a native American
invention; it was brought over by the Spaniards with its name, which is
simply Latin _laqueus_, a rope. To use the noose for trapping purposes,
it is only necessary to set it in the track where game pass, for them to
run their heads into, as the North American Indians do. But the noose may
also be attached to a bough bent back so as to spring up when an animal
touches it, and catch him. Or a spear may be arranged as the savages of
the Malay Peninsula do it, with an elastic bamboo so bent back that when
released by the animal it will spear him. The suggestion has been already
mentioned (p. 195) that such a spring-trap first led to the invention
of the bow and arrow. Actual bows and arrows are set as traps in such
countries as Siberia, and the spring-gun is a modern improvement on these.
Lastly, the net is one of the things known to almost all men so far as
history can tell. The native Australians net game like ancient Assyrians
or English poachers, and are not less skilled in netting wild fowl. To
see this art at its height we may look at the pictures of fowling scenes
on the monuments of ancient Egypt, which show the great clap-nets taking
geese by scores; even the souls of the dead are depicted rejoicing in
this favourite sport in the world beyond the tomb.
Among the various arts of the fisherman, one common among rude tribes
was easily hit upon. Every day at the turn of the tide at river-mouths
and on low shores, and inland near streams after a flood, fish are left
behind in the shallow pools. Led by this experience, the savage has wit
enough to assist nature, as where the Fuegians put up stake fences on
the coast at low-water mark, while in South Africa near the rivers large
flats are walled in with loose stones ready for the floods. Thus our
fish-weirs and fish-dams are no novelties in civilization. Nor is the
device of drugging or narcotizing fish a civilized invention, but to be
seen in perfection among the tropical forest-tribes of South America, who
use for the purpose a score or so of different plants. There is nothing
surprising, however, in its being known to men so rude, for it must
often occur by accident, from the branches or fruit of the right kind
of euphorbia or paullinia falling into some forest pool, an experiment
which the observant native would not be slow to try again. Next, a mode
of fishing usual among savages, is spearing, the spear for this being
barbed, and often made more effective by the head spreading into several
barbed prongs. An account of a native Australian fishing describes him
lying athwart his bark canoe, with his spear-point dipping into the
water ready to go down without splashing, and what is more remarkable,
the fisherman keeping his own eyes under water, so that not only the
ripple does not disturb his view, but his aim is not interfered with by
the refraction of light which makes it so difficult for a man out of the
water to hit an object below the surface. The wilder races also know
well how after dark fish come to a light, so that salmon-spearing by
torchlight, now that it is no longer so frequent in Scotland or Norway,
may be seen in all its picturesqueness among the Indians of Vancouver’s
Island. Shooting fish with the bow and arrow, which many low tribes do
with wonderful dexterity, may be counted as a variety of fish-spearing.
The fish-hook is a contrivance not known to all savage tribes, but some
have it, as the Australians who cut their hooks out of shell, and are
even known to fish with a hawk’s claw attached to a line. The ancient
Egyptian would sit like a modern European angler by a canal or pond,
fishing with rod and line; his hook was of bronze. Only fly-fishing seems
not to have been known in ancient times. On the whole it is remarkable
how little modern fishermen have moved from the methods of the rudest and
oldest men. The savage fish-spear, with its three or four barbed prongs,
is curiously like that our sailors still use, and call a fish-gig. Only
we make the head of iron, not of wood and fish-teeth. So it is with the
harpoon used by American whalers, with its loosely fitting point which
comes off when the fish is struck, only remaining attached by a long cord
to the floating shaft; this is copied, but with a steel point, from the
bone-headed harpoon of the Aleutian Islanders. Our fishermen carry on
their business on a large scale, with their steam-trawlers and seines
which sweep a whole bay, but their net-fishing is much of the same kinds
as may be found among the peoples from whom we have here taken our early
examples of spearing and angling.
Thus man, even while he feeds himself as the lower animals do, by
gathering wild fruit and catching game and fish, is led by his higher
intelligence to more artificial means of getting these. Rising to the
next stage, he begins to grow supplies of food for himself. Agriculture
is not to be looked on as a difficult or out-of-the-way invention, for
the rudest savage, skilled as he is in the habits of the food-plants
he gathers, must know well enough that if seeds or roots are put in a
proper place in the ground they will grow. Thus it is hardly through
ignorance, but rather from roving life, bad climate, or sheer idleness,
that so many tribes gather what nature gives, but plant nothing. Even
very rude people, when they live on one spot all the year round, and
the climate and soil are favourable, mostly plant a little, like the
Indians of Brazil, who clear a patch of forest round their huts to grow
a supply of maize, cassava, bananas, and cotton. When we look at the
food-plants of the world, it appears that some few are grown much as in
their wild state, like the coco-nut and bread-fruit, but most are altered
by cultivation. Sometimes it is possible to find the wild plant and show
how man has improved it, as where the wild potato is found growing on
the cliffs of Chile. But the origin of many cultivated plants is lost to
tradition and has become a subject for tale-tellers. This is the case
with those edible grasses which have been raised by cultivation into the
cereals, such as wheat, barley, rye, and by their regular and plentiful
supply have become the mainstay of human life and the great moving power
of civilization. It is clear that the development of these grain-plants
from their wild state was before the earliest ages of history, which
throws back the beginnings of agriculture to times older still. How
ancient was the first tilling of the soil, is shown by ancient Egypt and
Babylonia, with their governments and armies, temples and palaces, for it
could have been only through carrying on agriculture for a long series
of ages that such populations could have grown up so closely packed
together as to form a civilized nation. Plants, when once brought into
cultivation, make their way from people to people across the globe. Thus
the European conquerors of America carried back the maize or Indian corn
which had been cultivated from unknown antiquity over the New World, and
which now furnishes the Italian peasant with his daily meal of polenta
or porridge; it is grown even in Japan, and down to the south of Africa,
where it is the “mealies” of the colonist. An English vegetable garden
is a curious study for the botanist who assigns to each plant its proper
home, and to the philologist who traces its name. Sometimes this tells
its story fairly, as where _damson_ and _peach_ describe these fruits
as brought from Damascus and Persia. But the _potato_, brought over
in Queen Elizabeth’s time, seems to have borrowed the name of another
plant botanically different, the _batata_, or sweet-potato. The luscious
tropical _ananas_ has lost its native Malay name except among botanists,
and has taken the name of the common fir-cone or _pine-apple_, which in
shape it so closely resembles.
[Illustration: FIG. 64.—_a_, Australian digging-stick; _b_, Swedish
wooden hack.]
[Illustration: FIG. 65.—Ancient Egyptian hoe and plough.]
By noticing how rude tribes till the soil, much is to be learnt as to
the invention of agricultural implements. Wandering savages like the
Australians carry a pointed stick to dig up eatable roots with, as in
Fig. 64 _a_. Considering how nearly planting a root is the same work
as digging one up, it is likely that a tribe beginning to till the
soil would use their root-digging sticks for the new purpose; indeed,
a pointed stake has been found as the rude husbandman’s implement both
in the Old and New World. It is an improvement on this to dig with a
flat-bladed tool like a spear, sword, or paddle, and thus we have the
civilized spade. A more important tool, the hoe, is derived from the pick
or hatchet. The wooden picks of the New Caledonians serve both as weapons
and for planting yams, while the African’s hatchet—an iron blade stuck in
a club—only has to have the blade turned across to become his hoe. It
is curious to find in Europe the rudest imaginable hoe, less artificial
than the elk’s shoulder-blade fastened to a stick, with which the North
American squaws hoed their Indian corn. This is the Swedish “hack,” Fig.
64 _b_, a mere stout stake of spruce-fir with a bough sticking out at
the lower end cut short and pointed. With this primitive implement in
old times fields were tilled in Sweden, and it was to be seen in forest
farmhouses within a generation or two. Swedish tradition records the
steps by which agriculture improved. The wooden hack was made heavier
and dragged by men through the ground, thus ploughing a furrow in the
simplest way; then the implement was made in two pieces, with a handle
for the ploughman and a pole for the men to drag by, the share was shod
with an iron point, and at last a pair of cows or mares were yoked on
instead of the men. This seems nearly the way in which, thousands of
years earlier, the hoe first passed into the plough. Fig. 65 is from
a picture of agriculture in ancient Egypt. Here the labourer is seen
following the plough to break up the clods with his peculiar hoe, with
its long, curved, wooden blade roped to the handle. Now looking at the
plough itself, it is seen to be such a hoe, rope and all, only heavier
and provided with a pair of handles for the ploughman to guide and keep
it down, while a yoke of oxen drag it through the ground. The valley of
the Nile was one of the districts where high agriculture earliest arose,
and in the picture here copied we may almost fancy ourselves seeing at
its birth the great invention of the plough. To arm it with a heavy
metal ploughshare, to shape this so that it shall turn the sod over in a
continuous ridge, to fix a coulter or “knife” in front to give the first
cut, and to mount the whole on wheels; all these were improvements known
in Rome in the classical period. In modern times we have the self-acting
plough no longer needing the ploughman to follow at the plough-tail, and
the steam-plough has a more powerful draught than oxen or horses. Yet
those who have looked at the earlier stages can still discern in the most
perfect modern plough the original hoe dragged through the ground.
There survives even now in the world a barbaric mode of bringing land
under cultivation, which seems to show us man much as he was when
he began to subdue the primæval forest, where till then he had only
wandered, gathering wild roots and nuts and berries. This primitive
agriculture was noticed by Columbus, when landing in the West Indies he
found the natives clearing patches of soil by cutting the brushwood and
burning it on the spot. This simple plan, where the wood is not only got
out of the way, but the ashes serve for dressing, may still be seen among
the hill-tribes of India, who till these plots of land for a couple of
years and then move on to a new spot. In Sweden this brand-tillage, as
it may be called, is not only remembered as the old agriculture of the
land, but in outlying districts it has lasted on into modern days, giving
us an idea what the rough agriculture of the early tribes may have been
like when they migrated into Europe. It is not to be supposed, on looking
at an English farm of the present day, that its improvements were made
all at once. The modern farming system has a long and changing history
behind it. One interesting point in its growth is that in long-past ages
much of Europe was brought under cultivation by village-communities. A
clan of settlers would possess themselves of a wide tract of land, and
near their huts they would lay out great common fields, which at first
they perhaps tilled and reaped in common as one family. It became usual
to parcel out this tillage land every few years into family lots, but
the whole village-field was still cultivated by the whole community,
working together in the time and way settled by the village elders.
This early communistic system of husbandry may still be seen not much
changed in the villages of such countries as Russia. Even in England its
traces have out-lasted the feudal system, and remain in the present days
of landlord and tenant. In several English counties there may still be
noticed the boundaries of the great common-fields, divided lengthwise
into three strips, which again were divided crosswise into lots, held by
the villagers; the three divisions were managed on the old three-field
system, one lying fallow while the other two bore two kinds of crops.
Next, as to the history of domesticating animals for food. The taming of
sociable creatures like parrots and monkeys is done by low forest tribes,
who delight in such pets; and very rude tribes keep dogs for guard and
hunting. But it marks a more artificial way of life when men come to
keep and breed animals for food. The move upwards from the life of the
hunter to that of the herdsman is well seen in the far north, the home
of the reindeer. Among the Esquimaux the reindeer was only hunted. But
Siberian tribes not only hunt them wild, but tame them. Thus the Tunguz
live by these herds, which provide them not only with milk and meat, but
with skins for clothing and tents, sinews for cord, bone and horn for
implements, while as they move from place to place the deer even serve
as beasts of draught and burden. Here is seen a specimen of pastoral
life of a simple rude kind, and it is needless to go on describing at
length the well-known life of higher nomade tribes, who shift their
tents from place to place on the steppes of Central Asia or the deserts
of Arabia, seeking pasture for their oxen and sheep, their camels and
horses. There is a strong distinction between the life of the wandering
hunter and the wandering herdsman. Both move from place to place, but
their circumstances are widely different. The hunter leads a life of few
appliances or comforts, and exposed at times to starvation; his place
in civilization is below that of the settled tiller of the soil. But to
the pastoral nomade, the hunting which is the subsistence of the ruder
wanderer, has come to be only an extra means of life. His flocks and
herds provide him for the morrow, he has valuable cattle to exchange with
the dwellers in towns for their weapons and stuffs, there are smiths in
his caravan, and the wool is spun and woven by the women. What best marks
the place in civilization which the higher pastoral life attains to, is
that the patriarchal herdsman may belong to one of the great religions of
the world; thus the Kalmuks of the steppes are Buddhists, the Arabs are
Moslems. A yet higher stage of prosperity and comfort is reached where
the agricultural and pastoral life combine, as they already did among
our forefathers in the village communities of old Europe just described.
Here, while the fields were cultivated near the village, the cattle
pastured in summer on the hills and in the woodlands belonging to the
community, where also the hunter went for game, while nearer home there
were common meadows for pasture and to provide the hay for the winter
weather, when the cattle were brought under shelter in the stalls. In
countries so thickly populated as ours is now, the last traces of the
ancient nomade life disappear when the herds are no longer driven off to
the hills in summer.
After the quest of food, man’s next great need is to defend himself. The
savage has to drive off the wild beasts which attack him, and in turn he
hunts and destroys them. But his most dangerous foes are those of his
own species, and thus in the lowest known levels of civilization war has
already begun, and is carried on against man with the same club, spear,
and bow used against wild beasts. General Pitt-Rivers has shown how
closely man follows in war the devices he learnt from the lower animals;
how his weapons imitate their horns, claws, teeth, and stings, even to
their venom; how man protects himself with armour imitated from animals’
hides and scales; and how his warlike stratagems are copied from those of
the birds and beasts, such as setting ambushes and sentinels, attacking
in bodies under a leader, and rushing on with war-cries to the fight.
We have already in the last chapter examined the principal offensive
weapons. The daubing on of venom to make them more deadly is found among
low tribes far over the world. Thus the Bushman mixes serpent’s poison
with the euphorbia juice, and the South American native poison-maker,
prepared by a long fast for the mysterious act, concocts the paralysing
_urari_ or _curare_ in the secret depths of the forest, where no woman’s
eye may fall on the fearful process. Poisoned arrows were known to the
ancient world, as witness the lines which tell of Odysseus going to
Ephyra for the man-slaying drug to smear his bronze-tipped arrows; but
Ilos would not give it, for he feared the ever-living gods. Thus it seems
that in early ages the moral sense of the higher nations had already
condemned the poisoned weapons of the savage, with something of the
horror Europeans now feel in examining the Italian bravo’s daggers of the
middle ages, with their poison-grooves imitated from the serpent’s tooth.
How the warrior’s armour comes from the natural armour of animals is
plainly to be seen. The beast’s own hide may be used, as where one sees
in museums the armour of bear-skins from Borneo, or breast-plates of
crocodile’s skin from Egypt. The name of the _cuirass_ shows that it
was at first of leather, like the _buff_ jerkin. The Bugis of Sumatra
would make a breastplate by sewing upon bark the cast-off scales of the
ant-eater, overlapping as the animal wore them; and so the natural armour
of animals was imitated by the Sarmatians, with their shoes of horses’
hoofs sewed together in overlapping scales like a fir-cone. Such devices,
when metal came in, would lead to the scale armour of the Greeks,
imitated from fish-scales and serpent-scales, while their chain-mail is
a sort of netted garment made in metal. The armour of the middle ages
continued the ancient kinds, now protecting the whole body with a suit
from head to foot (_cap-à-pée_) of iron scales, or mail (that is, meshes)
or of jointed plates of iron copied from the crab and lobster, such as
the later suits of armour which decorate our manorial halls. With the
introduction of gunpowder, armour began to be cast aside, and except the
helmet, what remains of it in military equipment is more for show than
use. The shield also, once so important a part of the soldier’s panoply,
has been discarded since the days of musketry. Our modern notion of a
shield is that of a large screen behind which the warrior can shelter
himself, but this does not appear to have been the original intention.
The primitive shield was probably the parrying-shield, used like the
narrow Australian parrying-stick, which is only four inches across in
the middle where it is grasped, but with which the natives ward off darts
with wonderful dexterity. The small round Highland target, one of the
varieties of shield which remained latest in civilized Europe, is made to
be thus dexterously handled as a weapon of defence, to ward off javelins,
or parry the thrust of spear or sword. It is easy to see that such
parrying-shields belong to the early kind of warfare where the battle was
a skirmish, and every warrior took care of himself. But when fighting
in close ranks began, then the great screen-shields would come in,
serving as a wall behind which the old Egyptian soldiers could ensconce
themselves, or the Greek or Roman storming-party creep up to the foot of
the wall in spite of stones and darts hurled down on them.
The savage or barbarian is apt to fall on his enemy unawares, seeking to
kill him like a wild beast, especially where there is bitter personal
hatred or blood-vengeance. But even among low tribes we find a strong
distinction drawn between such manslaughter and regular war, which is
waged not so much for mutual destruction as for a victory to settle a
quarrel between two parties. For instance, the natives of Australia have
come far beyond mere murder when one tribe sends another a bunch of
emu-feathers tied to the end of a spear, as a challenge to fight next
day. Then the two sides meet in battle array, their naked bodies terrific
with painted patterns, brandishing their spears and clubs, and clamouring
with taunts and yells. Each warrior is paired with an opponent, so that
the fight is really a set of duels, where spear after spear is hurled
and dodged or parried with wonderful dexterity, till at last perhaps a
man is killed, which generally brings the fray to an end. Among the rude
Botocudos of Brazil, a quarrel arising from one tribe hunting hogs on
another’s ground might be settled by a solemn cudgelling-match, where
pairs of warriors belaboured one another with heavy stakes, while the
women fought by scratching faces and tearing hair, till one side gave
in. But if in such an encounter the beaten party take to their bows and
arrows, the scene may change into a real battle. When it comes to regular
war, the Botocudos will draw up their men fronting the enemy, pouring
in arrows, and then rushing together with war-whoops to fight it out
tooth and nail, killing man, woman, and child. They make expeditions to
plunder the villages of their settled neighbours, and when enemies are
near in the forest they will stick splinters in the ground as caltrops
to lame them, and shoot from ambush behind fallen trunks or shelters of
boughs. The slain in battle they will carry off to cook and devour at the
feast, where with wild drunken dancing their warlike zeal is inflamed
to frenzied rage. Thus to excite courage is the purpose of the frantic
war-songs and war-dances, which are common to mankind, among savages and
even far more cultured nations. Low tribes also keep up the fierce hatred
and pride of battle by trophies of the enemy—his head dried and hung
as an ornament of the hut, or his skull fashioned into a drinking-cup.
The wars of the North American Indians have picturesque incidents often
described in our books, the braves smoking in solemn council of war, the
declaration of war by the bundle of arrows wrapped in a rattlesnake’s
skin, or the blood-red war-hatchet struck into the war-post, the
recruiting-feast where the dog was eaten as emblem of fidelity, the
war-party creeping through the woods in single line (which we thence call
“Indian file”) the stealthy attack on the enemy’s camp or village, the
wild scalp-dance of the returning victors, the torturing of the captives
at the stake, where the very children were set to shoot arrows at the
helpless foe, who bore his torments without a groan, boasting of his
own fierce deeds and taunting his conquerors in his death-agony. Indian
war was “to creep like a fox, attack like a panther, and fly like a
bird.” Yet at times the warriors of two tribes would meet in fair battle,
standing to watch duels between pairs of champions, or all rushing
together in a general mêlée.
In the warfare of rude races, it is to be noticed how fighting for
quarrel or vengeance begins to pass into fighting for gain. Among some
tribes the captives, instead of being slain, are brought back for slaves,
and especially set to till the ground. By this agriculture is much
increased, and also a new division of society takes place, to be seen
still arising among such warlike tribes as the Caribs, where the captives
with their children come to form a hereditary lower class. Thus we see
how in old times the original equality of men broke up, a nation dividing
into an aristocracy of warlike freemen, and an inferior labouring caste.
Also forays are made for the warriors to bring home wives, who are the
slaves and property of their captors. With this wife-capture is connected
the law widely prevailing among the ruder peoples of the world, and
lasting on even among the more civilized, that a man may not take a wife
from his own clan or tribe, but from some other. As property increases,
there appears with it warfare carried on as a business, by tribes living
more or less by plunder, glorying in their murderous profession, and
despising the mean-spirited farming villagers whose labour provides them
with corn and cattle. A perfect example of such a robber-tribe were the
Mbayas of South America, whose simple religion it was that their deity,
the Great Eagle, had bidden them live by making war on all other tribes,
slaying the men, taking the women for wives, and carrying off the goods.
War among civilized nations differs from that of savage tribes in
being carried on with better weapons and appliances, and by warriors
being trained to fight in regular order. The superiority of a regular
army to a straggling savage war-party may be well seen by looking at
the pictures in Wilkinson’s _Ancient Egyptians_, of troops marching
in rank and step to sound of trumpet, especially noticing the solid
phalanx of heavy infantry with spear and shield. The strength of such
Egyptian solid squares of 10,000 men is described in the Cyropædia
(probably with truth as to military tactics if not to actual history),
how they could not be broken even by the victorious Persians, but amid
the rout of man and horse the survivors still held out, sitting under
their shields, till Cyrus granted them honourable surrender. An Egyptian
army had its various corps divided into companies, and commanded by
officers of regular grades. In battle the heavy immovable phalanx held
the centre, the archers and light infantry in the wings acted in line
or open order, there were bodies of slingers, and the noble warriors
drove their chariots into the thick of the opposing host. This military
efficiency was attained by having a standing army formed by a regular
military class, trained from youth in the art of war, and maintained by
eight acres of land assigned to every soldier. From an early time also
we find the Egyptians employing foreign mercenary troops, whose peculiar
costumes and faces are conspicuous in the battle-pictures. Thus also
the Assyrian war-scenes show that their military system was on a level
with that of Egypt. The rise of the science of war to a higher stage
belongs to Greece, and the whole history of its growth is told in Greek
literature. Beginning with the Iliad, the descriptions there show war and
armies in a state more barbaric than in Egypt, with little discipline and
less generalship, and encounters of Greek and Trojan champions with the
armies looking on as savages would do. But when we come to later ages of
Greek history, it is seen that they had by that time not only learnt what
the older civilization had to teach, but had brought their own genius
to develop it further. Their corps of all arms, archers, charioteers,
cavalry, and the phalanx of spearmen, were disciplined and ranged in
order of battle much after the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian manner. But
whereas in old times a battle had been a trial of mere strength between
two armies drawn up facing one another, the military historian Xenophon
describes the change made in the art of war by the Theban leader,
Epaminondas, when at Leuktra, with forces fewer than the Spartans, he
charged with his men in column fifty deep against their twelve deep right
wing, and by breaking them threw the whole line into disorder, and won
the battle. At Mantineia, carrying out this plan yet more skilfully, he
arranged his troops in a wedge-shaped body with the weaker divisions
slanting off behind so as to come up when the enemy’s front was already
broken. In such ways was developed the science of military tactics,
which made skilful manœuvring as important as actual fighting. The
Romans, a nation drilled to battle and conquest, came at last to rule
the world by the mere force of military discipline. In the middle ages
the introduction of gunpowder increased the killing-power of troops
whose artillery from bows and arrows became muskets and heavy cannon.
The reader’s attention has been already drawn to the military scenes of
Egypt and Assyria. If now, fresh from watching the manœuvres of a modern
army in sham fight, he will look at these pictures to see war as it was
three or four thousand years ago, he will observe how substantially the
new system is founded on the old, with developments due to two new ideas,
namely, tactics and the use of fire-arms.
Somewhat the same lesson may be learnt by comparing the older and ruder
kinds of fortification and siege with those of modern times. Tribes at
the level of the Kamchatkans and the North American Indians knew how to
fortify their villages with embankments and palisades. In ancient Egypt
and Assyria and neighbouring countries, strong and high fortress-walls
and towers were defended by archers and slingers, and attacked by
storming-parties with scaling-ladders. Old sieges were unscientific,
as is so curiously seen in the Homeric poems, where the Greeks encamp
over against Troy, but seem to have no notion of regularly investing it,
much less of attack by sap and trench. The Greeks and Romans came on to
use higher art in fortification and siege, and there appear among them
machines of war such as the ancient battering-ram, heavy and skilfully
engineered, while contrivances of the nature of huge bows like the
catapult led up to the cannon of later ages which superseded them.
Lastly, looking at the army system as it is in our modern world, one
favourable change is to be noticed. The employment of foreign mercenary
troops, which almost through the whole stretch of historical record has
been a national evil alike in war and peace, is at last dying out. It
is not so with the system of standing armies which drain the life and
wealth of the world on a scale more enormous even than in past times, and
stand as the great obstacle to harmony between nations. The student of
politics can but hope that in time the pressure of vast armies kept on a
war-footing may prove unbearable to the European nations which maintain
them, and that the time may come when the standing army may shrink to a
nucleus ready for the exigencies of actual war if it shall arise, while
serving in peace time as a branch of the national police.