If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest
impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most
easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our
civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of
history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week
along the wall from Tyne to Solway would be the answer; or a week in
the great Roman cities of Provence with their triumphal arches and
their vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere: in old
quays, in ruined bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use
to-day, and in the columns of their living churches.
Now I was surprised to find myself after many years of dabbling in such
things, furnishing myself the answer in quite a different place. It was
in Picardy during the late manoeuvres of the French Army that, in the
intervals of watching those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and in
the intervals of long tramps after the regiments or of watching the
massed guns, the necessity for perpetually consulting the map brought
home to me for the first time this truth—that Picardy is the
province—or to be more accurate, Picardy with its marches in the Île de
France, the edge of Normandy and the edge of Flanders—which retains
to-day the most vivid impress of Rome. For though the great buildings
are lacking, and the Roman work, which must here have been mainly of
brick, has crumbled, and though I can remember nothing upstanding and
patently of the Empire between the gate of Rheims and the frontier of
Artois, yet one feature—the Roman road—is here so evident, so multiple,
and so enduring that it makes up for all the rest.
One discovers the old roads upon the map, one after the other, with a
sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one as one looks, and
always when one thinks one has completed the web another and yet
another straight arrow of a line reveals itself across the page.
The map is a sort of palimpsest. A mass of fine modern roads, a whole
red blur of lanes and local ways, the big, rare black lines of the
railway—these are the recent writing, as it were; but underneath the
whole, more and more apparent and in greater and greater numbers as one
learns to discover them, are the strict, taut lines which Rome
stretched over all those plains.
There is something most fascinating in noting them, and discovering
them one after the other.
For they need discovering. No one of them is still in complete use. The
greater part must be pieced together from lengths of lanes which turn
into broad roads, and then suddenly sink again into footpaths, rights
of way, or green forest rides.
Often, as with our rarer Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing
disappears under the plough or in the soft crossings of the river
valleys; one marks them by the straightness of their alignment, by the
place names which lie upon them (the repeated name Estrée, for
instance, which is like the place name “street” upon the Roman roads of
England); by the recovery of them after a gap; by the discoveries which
local archaeology has made.
Different men have different pastimes, and I dare say that most of
those who read this will wonder that such a search should be a pastime
for any man, but I confess it is a pastime for me. To discover these
things, to recreate them, to dig out on foot the base upon which two
thousand years of history repose, is the most fascinating kind of
travel.
And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with
Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier
town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of
country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build
up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great
roads to-day.
That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which
darts upon Rouen from Paris.
Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether
in the last twelve miles before the capital of Normandy, it still
stands on the modern map a great modern road with every aspect of
purpose and of intention in its going.
From Amiens again they radiate out, these roads, some, like the way to
Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the
sea, to the Portus Itius, to Boulogne, a mere lane often wholly lost
and never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the
French feudal cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crécy, and just beyond
Crécy it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating
manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads wherever the hunter
finds them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track, all the
way past Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussée, that
is Novelle on the paved road), on past Estrée (where from the height
you overlook the battlefield of Crécy), and that ruler so lying on your
map points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away—and in all
those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it.
But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is nothing like it
in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up
the whole of the mind. True, you will get no sauce of danger, but, on
the other hand, you will hunt for weeks and weeks, and you will come
back year after year and go on with your hunting, and sometimes you
actually find—which is more than can be said for hunting some animals
in the Weald.
How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of
the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went,
and the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come
during that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the
end of the Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared.
It is a sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which
serves Crécy, it gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those
ridges upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England, and then it
is gone. It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty
odd miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of
the legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few
yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be
that the little lane leading into Estrée shows where it crossed the
valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very
proper to the huntsman.
Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think,
when he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in
two to cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to
Noyon, the old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the
way, and it stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until
suddenly, without explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like
the life of a man. It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at
the edge of the wood which is there. And seek as you will, you will
never find it again.
From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object
was St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the
Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches
on to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think
that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out
north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven:
there is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and
out, and the open plough of the rolling land. But continue by your
compass so and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent
reason for its abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from
the capital of the Nervii, three days’ march and more, and pointing all
the time straight at Vermand.
And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and
there, as at Bavai, a great capital has decayed. Here and there (but
more rarely), a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans, but the
plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the
roads as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies
that you see marching to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a
morning the line which was taken by the Legions.