one other patch of sea (for you will avoid the Shambles), which is
a nuisance, and that is Saint Alban’s Race. When you have just been
through Portland you hardly notice Saint Alban’s, but if you are
going westward, so that Saint Alban’s comes first, you notice it more
than a little. For all the way down England, from the North Sea and
the Straits onwards, you will have come across nothing of this kind.
Everything to the east is more or less reasonable. If the sea rises, it
is because there is a wind. If you are checked, it is through a known
tide. But off Saint Alban’s Head you run into a piece of water which
has no rules.
You are first suspicious of something odd by an inability to follow
the rhythm of the seas. So far you have been going well, say, with a
south wind, luffing regularly to every sea and paying off again in
the hollows; the regular beat of the successive ridges has become
companionable; when all of a sudden a little sea from nowhere jumps
up on your beam, and catches you a smack, and immediately you are
in a tumble of water without rhyme or reason—nothing perilous, but
intolerably inconsequential. You will suddenly find the helm pulling
hard for no reason, and then as suddenly losing grip; and with
all this, there is no guessing the rate at which your stream will
move. I have been half a night passing Saint Alban’s with a leading
wind—light, it is true, but sufficient; and that only just after the
neaps, when the flood should be running slack. I have watched there in
the darkness hour after hour the blacker line of cliffs against the
blackness of the sky, and the shore, apparently immovable, refusing
to slip by. What is worse, Saint Alban’s Race is a sentient thing. It
knows all about you, and whether in its heart it only desires to play,
or whether it has a wickeder mind, a mind it certainly has.
Some years ago I was running down this coast with many companions—too
many for so small a craft. All was with us: an excellent wind, bright
sun, and a clear air. I warned my companions about this mischievous
patch (which is also haunted), and I said we would go right outside
and cheat it. So we put the bow a point or two off the course we were
making, so as to get right out into the open and leave the exasperation
of Saint Alban’s inshore in the place to which his bad temper belongs.
But not a bit of it. Even as we were looking landward, and laughing
to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we
thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, _the
thing ran at us_.
It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up
to play. It was abominably conscious and alive. It had said, ‘Here is a
boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,’
so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in
for an hour of it before we got to the regular water beyond.
I know a man who so dislikes this patch of curse upon the sea that he
boasts of passing it as of a feat, though, in truth, there is no feat
in it at all, but only an annoyance. So much did he pride himself upon
the passage of it once that, in coming into harbour, and being asked to
write something in the visiting book of the inn, he put down his name,
and the date, and this poem:
‘I made my passage through Saint Alban’s Race
And came to anchor in this bloody place.’
The person who owned the inn was very angry on seeing this poem, and
asked that it might be rubbed out. This the man of whom I speak very
humbly did, and substituted for the offensive couplet a long, long poem
in the heroic style, all in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, and iambic
at that, which poem is to be read there to this day.
You gentlemen of England—if gentlemen I may still call you—who travel
about in mechanical ships as big as a street of houses, know nothing of
these things.
But I will tell you one last thing about Saint Alban’s Race. I have
said that it is haunted. Well, what do you think of this? As I was
passing there once, there came up to me, catching me up, at a pace far
faster than the dear Nona could ever sail, such a fine rich little
boat, with canvas so new and so tight, and so white, and painted and
enamelled, and gear well trammelled, and the brasswork shining like
the sun, and the cordage new, and varnish upon all the combings, and
on the tiller, and at her helm a man dressed as though for Cowes Week
in opéra bouffe. She foamed, and was running past in a streak. The
day was bright, well past its noon, and the shores of England stood
clear all abeam. There was the Wight, with its brilliant chalk cliffs
taking the sunlight, and there, very clear, the Hampshire coast, and
right at hand, Purbeck: all as neat as a picture. But the man in the
exhibition-shop-window boat hailed me, and shouted through a horn,
pointing fiercely eastward, as he stood up and steered with his knee,
‘Are those the Needles?’
Now what could such a portent mean? What was the explanation of that
mystery? The sea brings all adventures, but what adventure was this?
Whence did this man come? How could any man so lay a course from the
Bill eastward without knowing what the Needles were, and without
recognising them when he saw them? It is true we were end on; but they
are the most conspicuous rocks, by their shape, in all the Channel,
and they are as familiar as Piccadilly. Even a man who had never
seen them must know by his chart where they lay, and by the obvious,
unmistakable, glaring white point of the Island. To ask ‘Are those the
Needles?’ was like asking ‘Is that the Eddystone?’ when one had been
sailing with a good breeze southward from Plymouth, and perceived a
tall tower standing up utterly alone in the midst of the seas, very far
from land. This man could not have crossed the Atlantic (though men
have done so in boats no larger), for she was spick and span. And even
had he crossed the Atlantic, he would have a chart. Was he, perhaps, a
Western man, who had lived all his life as in Devon or Cornwall, and
had set out thus in middle age to explore the strange Eastern people
beyond Portland Bill?
There may be some few such remaining who wisely root themselves in
their native place, and such a man might for so short a course take no
chart—in which case he would have only himself to blame for running
through the Shambles, and drowning if God so willed. At any rate, there
he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.
For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old
Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered
into me, and I answered, ‘Yes.’
He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is
nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected
with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of
problems set them in fiction; that is why a good detective story very
properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent:
that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by
women, whereas your ordinary best-seller, so full of what they call
‘psychology,’ is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also,
intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories
of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also
(especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like
‘Trent’s Last Case,’ Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt,
the best detective story in English to-day), yet it is a pale pursuit
compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the
difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing
man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure.
That author knew the solution from the beginning—as is proper to a
creator—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any
way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon
either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to
reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things,
which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to
who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved
great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of
a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical
problems are the most fascinating of all.
There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known
probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the
Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each
of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery
of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of
witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these
there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory
the one to the other.
In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that
a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a
ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe
that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other,
and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance,
place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask
whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would
accept as normal the signature ‘The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.’ at the end
of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let
alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say
that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide
between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that
a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a
dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself,
and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who
had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate,
did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long
process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion
inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and
living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd
signature as normal?
The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little
reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between
two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised
him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of
his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity—and, after seeing
all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately
broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting
certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against
a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a
man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his
youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as
well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular
problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.
Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe
what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean
with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs.
But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means
that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood
the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal
profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as
violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment
in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.
Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I
always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between
my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of
the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the
claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to
me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I
remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who
was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took
me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of
course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are
falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders,
but I am as certain as any one can be of such a memory, and I believe
it is the earliest thing of which I have any clear memory left.
Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with
history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the
daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a life-long
companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her
ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a
child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg
of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a
child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again
to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the
stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and
told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar
old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard
of the fall of the Bastille from an eye-witness; and that would be as
though some very old person to-day were to tell one that he had spoken
to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a
child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very
old person to-day were to remember having met in childhood a person who
had talked to one who had seen John Milton.
The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions
that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!)
been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of
Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only
man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong
there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen
who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and
who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of
Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were
many others.
Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable
facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge
all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the
probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided;
they remain divided to-day upon the issue after more than thirty
years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure
the conviction of a man against whom there was strong _prima facie_
evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence
Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on
its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming
motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser,
but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small
immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers,
one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been
challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard
themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were
above the law.
I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I
doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court,
and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all
the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most
technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there
was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five
judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.
Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to
judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully
competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.
There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of
Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society,
enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for,
the other against.
I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will
remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained,
or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend,
intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of
criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.
The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and
that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that
we owe the four years of war, 1914-18: for it destroyed the French
Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and
Charleroi.
Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally
determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no
such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical
oppositions.
It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially
historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but
dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained
unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved
either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as
though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so
that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation
which as a fact has been carefully avoided.
For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity ‘drawn up’ upon
a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use,
but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach.
Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred
and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Cæsar landed at
Deal his small but respectable force in this fashion, not through a
harbour, but on a beach; and civilian sailing and piracy all used the
same method. The ship of antiquity could ride, and also be moored in
harbour, but was also beached. It came up to a shelving shore _and
was pulled up on to the land_. It was pulled up out of reach of the
waves; and it will be remembered how Cæsar got into trouble during
his first expedition (and second!) because he had not allowed for an
exceptionally high tide accompanied by a storm. He got his ships on
shore all right, but he had not pulled them up far enough.
How was it done? You cannot say it was done by capstans, because that
could only apply to beaches already prepared. If you say it was done
by hauling upon ropes over rollers the answer is not sufficient. How
was the boat kept upright while this was going on, and what numbers
would not be required to beach thus even a single ship of three or
four hundred tons, and, having so beached it, by what means could one
rapidly float it again?
The ancients had some method which they took for granted, for they
knew the difficulty of it, and which landsmen had seen practised a
thousand times, and yet of which no description has come down to us in
our fragmentary records of the past. The poets tell us that the ships
stand upon the shore, and they leave it at that. They seem to tell us
also that the boats were helped up stern foremost, but how on earth
the thing could be done with a very large armament rapidly, and upon a
beach unprepared, baffles us.
There is another problem I have never seen solved. How did Barbarians
organise and commissariat the enormous bodies which came across the
Alps for the plunder of Italy, and were as a rule destroyed by the
Italian armies in antiquity. How did they get such a force as that of
Radagasius across the Alps, or that of Brennus? I choose the Alps in
particular because it is an extreme case, but it is almost as difficult
to understand how they moved across flat country. In the case of the
Alps, you had narrow tracks for much more than a day’s march, often
for a week’s march; tracks from which it was impossible to deploy to
right and left. There must, therefore, have been a very long column in
file, a column of many, many miles. It is easy to calculate, in the
case of Radagasius, that he could not possibly have extended over less
than thirty miles, and probably his column covered a good deal more.
Our academic writers seem to think that a body of this sort moves as
a matter of course, like an individual, or like a small body which
can easily organise its movements: a dozen people out for a walk. But
here you have numbers in respect of which any one with an elementary
knowledge of military history, knows that high organisation alone could
prevent disaster.
Ask a modern staff with every modern advantage, and even with a good
modern road on which the columns could advance on a front of four, to
move by a single road a quarter of a million human beings, half of them
fighting men, from Augsburg to Milan. Consider the preparation such
a march would mean; the exact forethought required, establishing the
position of each column at the end of each day’s march; the calculation
of provisions, the arrangement for the passing up and down of waggons
or of pack animals, the strict discipline necessary to prevent bunching
throughout the whole column; the confusion—these and a hundred
other points. We all know that very good staff work, taking plenty of
time, and with every modern advantage of map and transport, will do
it in such and such a fashion. We also know that a few mistakes on
the staff might easily so bungle the affair that only a dribble would
get across in time, and the bulk would starve and die. Yet these huge
barbaric forces, in some undescribed way, so traversed the mountains
and debouched upon the plains of Italy, having evidently thought out
some form of screen or advance guard—otherwise they would have been
blocked on emerging from the pass—having some clearly elaborate system
of commissariat, and so on. Not a word of all that has come down to us
from antiquity. We do not know how it was done. What is more, we cannot
see _how_ it was done by men who had no writing, and only the vaguest
notions of topography.
The harbour of Poole, for which we were making during that run along
the Dorset coast when we were hailed by the Needle man, has a problem
of the sort attaching to it.
You come round the Anvil Point, and there, if you are lucky, you catch
another tide. There are many such points on the coast where you can
carry the tide with you much longer than the due six hours or so, by
coming into the midst of a fresh tide at the very end of the old one.
The main stream seems to shoot past Anvil Point, towards the Island. If
you come to Anvil Point and the corner of Dorset just at the very top
of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage
Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and
another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.
Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands,
expecting doom. He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser
(but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he
is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea
without companionship. I think he longs for his release.
Beyond Old Harry you come to that odd entry of Poole, the history of
which is, I say, inexplicable to me. It was a main harbour for the
Romans; and when the Scandinavian pirates came down to destroy this
outer province of Christendom, they used it as a known base. It was
sailing out of Poole that a great fleet of their ships—ninety I am
glad to say—coming to pillage this Roman land, were piled up and
destroyed in Swanage Bay; and it was from Poole that they went up water
to Wareham, and thence made their foray by land to Exeter.