ESTO PERPETUA
[Illustration]
ESTO PERPETUA
ALGERIAN STUDIES AND IMPRESSIONS
BY H. BELLOC
AUTHOR OF “THE PATH TO ROME”
LONDON: DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
MCMVI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
E. S. P. HAYNES
INTRODUCTION
Once, in a village that overlooked the Mediterranean, I saw a man
working in an open shop, fitting together a builder’s Ornament which was
to go upon the ridge-end of some roof or other. He was making the base
of the Ornament so as to fit on to a certain angle of the rafters, and
the Ornament itself was a Cross. It was spring time, and he was singing.
[Illustration]
I asked him for whom he was making it. He answered, for a man who had
ordered it of him over-sea in Algiers.
But another Ornament also stood by, carved in the same way, and similar
in size. I asked him for whom he had finished that other, and he said,
“For the same man over-sea: he puts them upon buildings.” This second
Ornament, however, happened to be a Crescent.
[Illustration]
The contrast moved me to cross the sea, to understand the land upon the
further shore, and to write upon Africa some such little historical
essay as follows.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
When a man first sees Africa, if it is just before the rising of the
sun, he perceives, right up against a clean horizon, what appear to be
islands standing out distinct and sharp above the sea.
[Sidenote: The Landfall]
At this hour a wind is often blowing from the eastward, and awakens the
Mediterranean as though it came purposely at dawn to make the world
ready for the morning. The little waves leap up beneath it, steep
towards their shadows, and the bows of the ship that had surged all
night through a rolling calm begin, as sailors say, to “speak”: the
broken water claps and babbles along the side. In this way, if he has
good fortune, the traveller comes upon a new land. It is that land, shut
off from all the rest between the desert and the sea, which the Arabs
call the Island of the West, the Maghreb, but to which we in Europe for
many hundred years have given the name of Barbary: as it says in the
song about freedom:
“... as large as a Lion reclined
By the rivers of Barbary.”
It is the shore that runs, all built upon a single plan, from Tunis and
the Gulf of Carthage to Tangier; that was snatched from Europe in one
great cavalry charge twelve hundred years ago, and is now at last again
in the grasp of Europe.
[Sidenote: The Roads]
For many hours the traveller will sail towards it until at last he comes
to a belt of smooth water which, in such weather, fringes all that
coast, and then he finds that what he saw at morning was not a line of
islands, but the tops of high hills standing in a range along the sea:
they show darker against a stronger light and a more southerly sun as he
draws nearer, and beyond them he sees far off inland the first buttress
mountains which hold up the plateaux of Atlas.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Character of Barbary]
The country which he thus approaches differs in its fortune and history
from all others in the world. The soil and the relief of the Maghreb,
coupled with its story, have made it peculiar and, as it were, a symbol
of the adventures of Europe. Ever since our western race began its own
life and entered into its ceaseless struggle against the East, this
great bastion has been held and lost again; occupied by our enemies and
then taken back as our power re-arose. The Phœnician ruled it; Rome
wrested it back; it fell for the last time when the Roman Empire
declined; its reconquest has been the latest fruit of our recovery.
It is thoroughly our own. The race that has inhabited it from its origin
and still inhabits it is our race; its climate and situation are ours;
it is at the furthest limit from Asia; it is an opposing shore of our
inland sea; it links Sicily to Spain; it retains in every part of it the
Menhirs and the Dolmens, the great stones at which our people sacrificed
when they began to be men: yet even in the few centuries of written
history foreign gods have twice been worshipped there and foreign rulers
have twice held it for such long spaces of time that twice its nature
has been forgotten. Even to-day, when our reoccupation seems assured, we
speak of it as though it were by some right originally Oriental, and by
some destiny certain to remain so. During the many centuries of our
decline and of our slow resurrection, these countries were first cut off
so suddenly and so clean from Christendom, next steeped so long and so
thoroughly in an alien religion and habit of law, that their very dress
and language changed; and until a man has recognised at last the faces
beneath the turbans, and has seen and grown familiar with the great
buildings which Rome nowhere founded more solidly than in these
provinces, he is deceived by the tradition of an immediate past and by
the externals of things: he sees nothing but Arabs around him, and feels
himself an intruder from a foreign world.
Of this eastern spirit, which is still by far the strongest to be found
in the states of Barbary, an influence meets one long before one has
made land. The little ships all up and down the Mediterranean, and
especially as one nears the African coast, are in their rig and their
whole manner Arabian.
[Sidenote: The Normal Sail]
There is a sort of sail which may be called the original of all sails.
It is the sail with which antiquity was familiar. It brought the ships
to Tenedos and the Argo carried it. The Norwegians had it when they were
pirates a thousand years ago. They have it still. It is nearer a
lug-sail than anything else, and indeed our Deal luggers carry something
very near it. It is almost a square sail, but the yard has a slight rake
and there is a bit of a peak to it. It is the kind of sail which seems
to come first into the mind of any man when he sets out to use the wind.
It is to be seen continually to-day hoisted above small boats in the
north of Europe.
[Illustration]
But this sail is too simple. It will not go close to the wind, and in
those light and variable airs which somehow have no force along the
deck, it hangs empty and makes no way because it has no height.
[Sidenote: The Lateen]
Now when during that great renaissance of theirs in the seventh century
the Arabs left their deserts and took to the sea, they became for a
short time in sailing, as in philosophy, the teachers of their new
subjects. They took this sail which they had found in all the ports they
had conquered along this coast—in Alexandria, in Cyrene, in Carthage, in
Cæsarea—they lightened and lengthened the yard, they lifted the peak up
high, they clewed down the foot, and very soon they had that triangular
_lateen_ sail which will, perhaps, remain when every other evidence of
their early conquering energy has disappeared. With such a sail they
drove those first fleets of theirs which gave them at once the islands
and the commerce of the Mediterranean. It was the sail which permitted
their invasion of the northern shores and the unhappy subjection of
Spain.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Its Reefing]
We Europeans have for now some seven hundred years, from at least the
Third Crusade, so constantly used this gift of Islam that we half forget
its origin. You may see it in all the Christian harbours of the
Mediterranean to-day, in every port of the Portuguese coast, and here
and there as far north as the Channel. It is not to be seen beyond
Cherbourg, but in Cherbourg it is quite common. The harbour-boats that
run between the fleet and the shore hoist these lateens. Yet it is not
of our own making, and, indeed, it bears a foreign mark which is very
distinct, and which puzzles every northerner when first he comes across
this sail: it reefs along the yard. Why it should do so neither history
nor the men that handle it can explain, since single sails are
manifestly made to reef from the foot to the leach, where a man can best
get at them. Not so the lateen. If you carry too much canvas and the
wind is pressing her you must take it in from aloft, or, it must be
supposed, lower the whole on deck. And this foreign, quaint, unusual
thing which stamps the lateen everywhere is best seen when the sail is
put away in harbour. It does not lie down along the deck as do ours in
the north, but right up along the yard, and the yard itself is kept high
at the masthead, making a great bow across the sky, and (one would say)
tempting Providence to send a gale and wreck it. Save for this
mark—which may have its uses, but seems to have none and to be merely
barbaric—the lateen is perfect in its kind, and might be taken with
advantage throughout the world (as it is throughout all this united sea)
for the uniform sail. For this kind of sail is, for small craft, the
neatest and the swiftest in the world, and, in a general way, will lie
closer to the wind than any other. Our own fore-and-aft rig is nothing
else but a lateen cut up into mainsail, foresail, and jib, for the
convenience of handling.
[Sidenote: The Little Ships]
The little ships, so rigged, come out like heralds far from the coast to
announce the old dominion of the East and of the religion that made
them: of the united civilisation that has launched them over all its
seas, from east of India to south of Zanzibar and right out here in the
western place which we are so painfully recovering. They are the only
made thing, the only _form_ we accepted from the Arab: and we did well
to accept it. The little ships are a delight.
You see them everywhere. They belong to the sea and they animate it.
They are similar as waves are similar: they are different as waves are
different. They come into a hundred positions against the light. They
heel and run with every mode of energy.
[Illustration]
There is nothing makes a man’s heart so buoyant as to see one of the
little ships bowling along breast-high towards him, with the wind and
the clouds behind it, careering over the sea. It seems to have borrowed
something of the air and something of the water, and to unite them both
and to be their offspring and also their bond. When they are middle-way
over the sea towards one under a good breeze, the little ships are
things to remember.
So it is when they carry double sail and go, as we say of our schooners,
“wing and wing.” For they can carry two sails when the wind is moderate,
and especially when the vessel is running before it, but these two sails
are not carried upon two masts, but both upon the same mast. The one is
the common or working sail, carried in all weathers. The other is a sort
of spinnaker, of which you may see the yard lying along decks in harbour
or triced up a little by the halyard, so as to swing clear of the hands.
[Illustration]
When the little ships come up like this with either sail well out and
square and their course laid straight before the general run of a fresh
sea, rolling as they go, it is as though the wind had a friend and
companion of its own, understanding all its moods, so easily and rapidly
do they arrive towards the shore. A little jib (along this coast at
least) is bent along the forestay, and the dark line of it marks the
swing and movement of the whole. So also when you stand and look from
along their wake and see them leaving for the horizon along a slant of
the Levantine, with the breeze just on their quarter and their laden
hulls careening a trifle to leeward, you would say they were great
birds, born of the sea, and sailing down the current from which they
were bred. The peaks of their tall sails have a turn to them like the
wing-tips of birds, especially of those darting birds which come up to
us from the south after winter and shoot along their way.
[Illustration]
Moreover the sails of these little ships never seem to lose the memory
of power. Their curves and fulness always suggest a movement of the
hull. Very often at sunset when the dead calm reflects things unbroken
like an inland pond, the topmost angle of these lateens catches some
hesitating air that stirs above, and leads it down the sail, so that a
little ripple trembles round the bows of the boat, though all the water
beside them is quite smooth, and you see her gliding in without oars.
She comes along in front of the twilight, as gradual and as silent as
the evening, and seems to be impelled by nothing more substantial than
the advance of darkness.
[Illustration]
It is with such companions to proclaim the title of the land that one
comes round under a point of hills and enters harbour.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Mediterranean]
To comprehend the accidents which have befallen the Maghreb it is
necessary to consider its position and the nature of the boundaries
which surround it. In order to do this one must see how it stands with
regard to the Mediterranean and to the Desert.
[Illustration]
Here is a rough map on which are indicated the shores of that sea, and
to appreciate its scale it is easiest to remember that its whole length
from the Straits of Gibraltar at =M= to the Levantine coast at =A= is
well over 2000 miles. In this map those shores which are well watered
and upon which men can build cities and can live are marked black. The
great desert beyond to the south, which perpetually threatens the
further shore and in which men can only live here and there in little
oases of watered land is marked with sloping lines.
It is easy to see how this great surrounded water nourished the seeds of
our civilisation: why all the influences we enjoy here in the north came
upwards to us from its harbours: why Asia stretched out towards it in
order to learn, and attempted (but always failed) to absorb it. It is so
diversified by great peninsulas and very numerous islands that the
earliest sailors need never miss the land: it has so indented and varied
a coast that harbours are nowhere lacking to it. Its climate is of that
kind best suited to men, yielding them fruits and warmth with some
labour, but not so hardly as to sour them into brutality nor so cheaply
as to degrade them by indolence. The separate homes in which polities
can grow up separately and cherish their separate lives, were fortified
by the sea which protected its archipelagoes and its long tongues of
land, and were further guarded by the many mountain chains which so
affect the horizons all along these coasts that almost every landfall
you make as you sail is some very high, and often sacred, hill. But all
this difference was permitted to interact upon itself and to preserve a
common unity by the common presence of the sea. If it be true, as the
wisest men have said, that everything comes from salt water, then
nowhere in the world could the influence of the sea do more to create
and feed the aspirations of men. Whether our race came thither from the
north and east, or, as is more probable, from the African shore, this
much is certain, that there grew up round the Mediterranean, Europe,
which is Ourselves.
[Sidenote: The Phœnicians]
At one part things alien to us impinge upon this sea; this part is the
eastern bay which is marked off upon the map with a dotted line and the
shores of which are the outposts of Asia and of the Egyptians. The
projection on the south is that delta of the Nile from which Egypt
looked out jealously against rivals whom she despised or ignored: the
long Levantine coast which blocks the eastern end of the whole sea was
alive with the essence of the Asiatic spirit: with the subtlety, the
yielding and the avarice of the Phœnician cities. Egypt may have
attempted something westward: there is a legend of struggles with a fair
people, and to this day in the salt marshes south of Tunis a group of
date-trees, abandoned and unplucked, are called the “Dates of Pharaoh”
and resemble no dates of that country, but the dates of the Nile valley.
But if such expeditions were made they were fruitless. The desert was
still a secure boundary for us: the first attack which Europe was to
suffer came not from the sands, but from its own sea, and the first
conquerors of the Maghreb were the Phœnicians.
This people were Orientals, like any others; but they had, as it were,
specialised upon one most notable character of their race, which is to
accumulate wealth by negotiation, and to avoid as far as may be the
labour of production. To no other family of men has toil appeared to be
a curse save to that of which the Phœnicians were members; nor are
fatigues tolerable to that family save those endured in acquiring the
possessions of others and in levying that toll which cunning can always
gather from mere industry. Of all effort travel alone was congenial to
them, and especially travel by sea, which, when they had first developed
it, became for many centuries their monopoly and gave them the carrying
of the world and the arbitrament of its exchanges. They dwelt in a small
group of harbours on that extreme eastern shore of the Mediterranean,
where a narrow strip of fertile land lay between them and the mountains.
They sailed out before the steady northerly and easterly winds of
summer, (which are but a portion of the Trade Winds;) they pushed from
headland to headland and from island to island, bringing into economic
contact the savage tribes and the wealthy states, passionate especially
for metals, but carefully arranging that there should arise between the
nations whom they exploited or served no such direct bond as would
exclude their own mediation. Three thousand years ago their language was
reflected in the names of half the landmarks and roadsteads of the
sea—later the Greeks attempted to explain these names by punning upon
their sound in some Greek dialect and fitting to each some fantastic
legend.
As the Asiatics ran thus westward before the summer gales, their path
was barred at last by the eastern shore of Barbary.
It is curious to note how specially designed was this coast, and
especially its north-eastern promontories, for the first landing-place
of Asiatics upon our shores. The recess which is marked upon the map
with an =X= and which is now called the Gulf of Tunis was designed in
every way to arrest these merchants and to afford them opportunities for
their future dominion.
[Illustration:
=A= Phœnicia
=B= Berenice
=C= Cyrene
=L= Leptis
=S= Syrtis
]
They had sounded along the littoral of the desert: they were acquainted
with the harbours which led them westward along the Libyan beach and
with the little territories which were besieged all round by the sand
and drew their life from the sea: where later were to rise Cyrene and
Berenice and Leptis.
[Sidenote: The Bay of Carthage]
They had seen the mirage all along that hot coast, and bare sandhills
shimmering above shallow roadsteads: they had felt round the lesser
Syrtis for water and a landing-place and had found none, when the
shore-line turned abruptly east and north before them. It showed first
the rank grass of a steppe; it grew more and more fertile as they
advanced: at last, as they rounded the Hermæan promontory, they opened a
bay, the mountainous arms of which broke the Levanter and whose aspect
immediately invited them to beach their keels.
[Sidenote: “Afrigya”]
It stands at the narrow passage between the eastern and the western
basins of the Mediterranean; and the western basin had not as yet been
visited (it would seem) by men capable of developing its wealth. This
bay upon which the Tyrians landed was sheltered and deep: there was, as
in their own country, a belt of fertile soil between the shore and the
mountains; the largest river of Barbary was to hand. Their first
settlements, of which Utica, near Porto Farina, was perhaps the
earliest, began the new expansion of the Phœnician people. They called
the shore their “Afrigya”—that is, their “colony.” The word took root
and remained. It was in this way that Asia, much older than we are, much
more wily, not so brave, came in as a merchant and crept along till she
found, and landed on, the Maghreb, where it stands out across the entry
to the western seas.
[Sidenote: Carthage]
When these first African cities had been founded for some centuries,
there was built on the same gulf and at its head—perhaps as a depôt for
Utica, more probably as a refuge for Tyrian exiles—a city called “The
New Town”: it is of this title, whose Semitic form must have resembled
some such sound as “Karthadtha,” that the Greeks made Carchedon and the
Latins Carthago, and it was from this centre that there arose and was
maintained for seven hundred years over the Western Mediterranean an
Oriental influence which was always paramount and threatened at certain
moments to become universal and permanent.
Our race was not then conscious of itself. Gaul, Spain, the Alps and
Italy north of the Apennines were a dust of tribes, villages and little
fortified towns to which there was not to be given for many centuries
the visible unity which we inherit from Rome. Rome itself was not yet
walled. Southern Italy, though far more wealthy, was divided, and as for
Africa it was full of roving men, Berbers, to whom some prehistoric
chance, coupled with their soil and climate, had bequeathed such horses
and such a tradition of riding as their descendants still possess. These
savages must have felt in their blood that the Greek colonies, (when
such towns were planted among them,) were of their own family and
worshipped gods whom they could understand; just as, much later, they
learnt to accept quite easily the kindred domination of the Italians:
but the western instinct was still far too vague to permit of any
coalition, or to react with any vigour against the newcomers from the
east. It was not till travel, increasing wealth and the discipline of
government had permitted the nomads to know themselves for Europeans
that the presence of the foreigner became first irksome and then
intolerable. It was not till nearly seven hundred years had passed that
Rome, the centre and representative of the West, first conquered and
then obliterated the power of Asia in this land.
Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent, and as she grew, manifested to the
full the spirit which had made her. Her citizens sailed through the
Straits of Gibraltar; they knew the African and the Iberian coasts of
the Atlantic. They may have visited Britain. They crossed Gaul. It is
said that they saw the Baltic. And everywhere they sought eagerly and
obtained the two objects of their desire: metals and negotiation. In
this quest, in spite of themselves, these merchants, who could see
nothing glorious in either the plough or the sword, stumbled upon an
empire. Their constitution and their religion are enough to explain the
fate which befell it.
They were governed, as all such states have been, by the wealthiest of
their citizens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought
a mere plutocracy; its populace were admitted to such lethargic
interference with public affairs as they might occasionally demand;
perhaps they voted: certainly they did not rule; and the whole city
enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown
to it, for its vast mass of poorer members could not even be armed in
the service of their country, save at a wage, and certainly had no
military aptitudes to waste upon domestic quarrels. To such a people the
furious valour of Roman and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar
anarchy, nor perhaps could they understand that the States which are
destined alternately to dominate the world by thought or by armies are
in every age those whose energy creates a perpetual conflict within
themselves. It was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they
depended for their existence upon a profound sense of security and that
they based it upon a complete command of the sea. It was their
contention that since no others could (to use their phrase) “wash their
hands” in the sea without the leave of Carthage, their polity was
immortal. They made no attempt to absorb or to win the vast populations
from whom they claimed various degrees of allegiance. The whole Maghreb,
and, later, Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and
Sardinia, were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary
troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town. When they
contemplated their own greatness their satisfaction must have reposed
upon the density of their population—their walls may have held more than
half a million souls at a time when few towns of the west could count a
tenth of such a number—upon their immemorial security from invasion,
upon the excessive wealth of their great families (whose luxury the
whole nation could contemplate with a vicarious satisfaction), upon the
solidity of their credit, the resources of their treasury, and, above
all, upon the excellent seamanship, the trained activity, and the
overwhelming numbers of their navy.
As for their religion, it was of that dark inhuman sort which has in
various forms tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves. Gods remote
and vengeful, an absence of those lesser deities and shrines which grace
common experience and which attach themselves to local affections:
perhaps some awful and unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence and
fear distinguished it. Even the goddess who presided over their loves
had something in her at once obscene and murderous.
It is natural to those who are possessed by such servile phantasies that
their worship should mix in with the whole of their lives and even
penetrate to an immoderate degree those spheres of action which a
happier and a saner philosophy is content to leave untrammelled. These
dreadful deities of theirs afforded names for their leaders and served
for a link between the scattered cities of their race: the common
worship of Melcarth made an invisible bond for the whole Phœnician
world; the greatest of the Carthaginian generals bore the title of
“Baal’s Grace.”
With this gloomy and compelling faith and with this political
arrangement there went such a social spirit as such things will breed.
Not only were the Carthaginians content to be ruled by rich men always,
but the very richest were even too proud for commerce; they lived as a
gentry upon land and saw, beneath the merchants who were their immediate
inferiors (and accustomed, it may be presumed, to purchase superior
rank) a great herd of despicable and never laborious poor—incapable of
rebellion or of foreign service. The very fields around the city were
tilled, not by the Carthaginians, but by the half-breeds who had at
least inherited something of western vigour and application.
When the crowd within the walls was too great, a colony would spring
from its overflow into some distant harbour: emigrants led by one of
those superiors without whom, as it seemed, the Phœnician was unable to
act. It would appear that these daughter-nations were as averse to
military sacrifice as their parent, and that they depended for their
protection upon no effort of their own, but upon the fleet and the
treasury of Carthage. In this way was built up a vast domain of
colonies, tributaries and naval bases which was sporadic and ill
organised in plan, enormous in extent, and of its nature lacking in
permanence.
No system more corrupt or more manifestly doomed to extinction could be
conceived, nor is it remarkable that when that system disappeared not a
trace of it should remain among the millions whom it had attempted to
command. Carthage had not desired to create, but only to enjoy:
therefore she left us nothing. Her very alphabet was borrowed from our
invention. Of seven hundred years during which the Asiatics had
dominated Barbary nothing is left. The extinction of their power was
indifferent or pleasing to the Mediterranean they had ruled; their
language dwindled on through five hundred further years—its literature
has been utterly forgotten. A doubtful derivation for the names of
Cadiz, of Barcelona, and of Port Mahon, a certain one for Carthagena,
are all that can be ascribed to-day to this fanatic and alien people:
for they came of necessity into conflict with the Power that was to
unify and direct the common forces of Europe.
At first the expansion of Carthage met with nothing more than could
amuse its facile energies and increase its contemptuous security: it
judged, exploited, or subsidised the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain
and Sardinia; it wrangled with the Greek colonies whom perhaps it
thought itself “predestined” to rule—for to prophesy was a weakness in
the blood from which it sprang. Some two centuries and a half before our
era, when these Orientals had had footing for near a thousand and
Carthage an existence of six hundred years, Rome moved to the attack.
[Sidenote: The Roman Attack]
Rome had already achieved and was leading a confederation of the Italian
peoples, she had already stamped her character and impressed her
discipline upon the most advanced portion of the west, she had for a
full generation minted that gold into coin, when she became aware that a
city with whom she had often treated and whom she had thought remote,
was present: something alien, far wealthier than herself, far more
numerous and boasting a complete hold of communications and of the
western sea. Between the two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the
sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent or despicable to the other.
[Sidenote: The Punic Wars]
The Roman people were military. They had no love for ships. The sea
terrified them: their expansion was by land and their horror of the sea
explains much of their history. The very boast of maritime supremacy
that Carthage made was a sort of challenge to their genius. They
accepted that challenge and their success was complete. Within a hundred
years they had first tamed and then obliterated their rival, and the
Maghreb re-entered Europe.
The first accidents of that conflict were of such a nature as to confirm
Carthage in her creed and to lead her on to her destiny. She found,
indeed, that the command of the sea was a doubtful thing: the landsmen
beat her in the first round; clumsily and in spite of seamanship. But
when, as a consequence of such defeat, they landed upon the African soil
which she had thought inviolable, there, to her astonishment, she
overwhelmed them. The loss of Sicily, to which she consented, did
nothing to warn her. She became but the greater in her own eyes: Sicily
she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain, an expansion the more
imperial that the new province was more distant and far larger, and
indefinitely more barbarous than the last. It may be imagined what a
bitter patriotism the surprises of the early struggle had bred in the
governing class of Carthage. From the moment when, in their unexpected
victory, they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to Moloch, this
aristocracy had determined upon a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of
them undertook the task and undertook it not from the Mother Country but
from the Empire. He marched from Spain.
The Second Punic War is the best known of campaigns. Every Roman army
that took the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy was open to the
army of Hannibal, and (wherever that army was present—but only there) at
his mercy. In spite of such miracles the Phœnician attempt completely
failed. It failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between
the Phœnician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the
western blood.
[Sidenote: The Failure of Carthage]
The army which Hannibal led recognised the voice of a Carthaginian
genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid.
Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies
must receive a wage, must be “volunteer”; and meanwhile the policy which
directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome
“interfered with business”; on this account alone the costly and unusual
effort of removing her was made.
The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an
abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and
subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister. The
Italian confederation was true because it reposed on other than economic
supports. The European passion for military glory survived every
disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in
meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat. The
very Gauls in Hannibal’s army, for all their barbaric anger against
Rome, were suspected by their Carthaginian employers, and in Rome itself
an exalted resolve, quite alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was
the only result of misfortune.
Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber nomads, whose vague sense of
cousinship with the Italians was chiefly shown in their contempt for the
merchant cities, harassed Carthage perpetually; and when at last the
Roman armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage fell. For somewhat
more than fifty years she continued to live without security of
territory or any honour, harassed by the nomad kings whom she dared not
strike because they were the allies of Rome. She was still enormous in
her wealth and numbers, it was only her honour that was gone; if indeed
she had ever comprehended honour as did her rival.
[Sidenote: The Destruction of Carthage]
The lapse of time brought no ease. There was something in the temper of
Asia that was intolerable to the western people. They saw it always
ready to give way and then to turn and strike. They detested its jealous
and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed dangerous to them.
The two great struggles, at the close of which Rome destroyed as one
destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the same family,
Carthage and Jerusalem. A pretext was chosen: Carthage was abject,
yielded three hundred hostages, and even all her arms. Only the matter
of her religion moved her and the order to remove the site of the town.
To this Carthage opposed a frenzy which delayed for three years the
capture of the city; but when it was taken it was utterly destroyed.
Every stone was removed, the land was left level, and suddenly, within a
very few years of that catastrophe, every influence of Carthage
disappeared. It was in this way that the first great power of the Orient
upon the Maghreb was extinguished.
This final act of Rome was accomplished within a hundred and fifty years
of the Nativity. The life of a man went by, and little more was done. It
was close upon our era before the Roman habit took root in Africa, a
century more before the Maghreb was held with any complete organisation.
By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals had come in to ruin it.
[Sidenote: The Roman Monuments]
There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years during
which Rome was to bring up this land into the general unity of Western
Europe. There is no other portion of the world Rome governed, not even
Southern Gaul, where her genius is more apparent. In that short interval
of daylight—a tenth of the known history of the Maghreb—Rome did more
than had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to do
in seven hundred more.
[Illustration]
It is indeed the peculiar mark of Barbary, which makes it a scene of
travel different from all others, that everywhere the huge monuments of
Rome stand out in complete desertion. If civilisation had been
continuous here as it has been in nearly every city of Europe, Africa
would not move one in this fashion. Or if a race, active and laborious,
had quarried these stones to build new towns, their aspect would be more
familiar, because in Europe we are accustomed to such decay and it helps
us to forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to find it here, sometimes
in the desert, nearly always in a solitude; to round a sandy hill
without trees or men and to come, beyond a dry watercourse, upon these
enormous evidences of our forerunners and their energy, is an impression
Europe cannot give.
[Sidenote: The Ampitheatre]
On the edge of the Sahara, in the very south of Tunis, where the salt of
the waste is already upon one, there stands an arena of appalling size.
It is smaller, but only a little smaller, than the Coliseum: it seems,
in the silence and the glare, far larger. The Romans built it in their
decline. You might as you watch it be in Rome or in Nîmes or in Arles,
but you look around you and see the plain, and then the ruin grows
fantastically broad and strong. Mountains are greatest when one wakes at
morning and sees them unexpectedly after a long night journey; when the
last sight one had by sunset was of low hills and meadows. So it is with
these ruins in Africa. The silence and the loneliness frame them. They
are sudden, and when they have once been seen, especially by a man who
wanders in that country on foot and does not know what marvel he may not
find at the next turn of the path, they never afterwards leave the mind.
[Sidenote: The Roman Planting of Trees and Towns]
The things Rome did in Barbary were these: Of agriculture, which had
been exceptional, despised by the cavalry of the mountains and confined
to the little plains at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made a noble
and, while she ruled, a permanent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests
of the return of Europe to her own in the Maghreb that with the advance
of our race, corn and vineyards advance, and with our retreat they
recede. Rome planted trees which brought and stored rain. She most
elaborately canalised and used the insufficient water of the high
plateaux. She established a system of great roads. Where Carthage had
produced the congestion of a few commercial centres, Rome spread out
everywhere small flourishing and happy towns; a whole string of them
along the coast in every bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is,
perhaps, not one of the little harbours backed up against the spurs of
the Atlas, each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-place beneath
its own. Here, as throughout the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy
and desired, for it was in her temper to be of a conquering simplicity
and in her chronicles she openly confessed her sins. The same unity
which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa. The Roman arch and brick and
column, the Roman road—all of one certain type—are as plain throughout
the Maghreb as a thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims.
[Sidenote: The Legionaries]
The desert was alien to Rome, as the sea was. The old trade from the
Soudan which had been the staple of Leptis and which Carthage had
certainly maintained, drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman Africa
turned to the Mediterranean and lived upon the commerce of its further
shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a string of posts was held. Biskra
was Roman, and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt indeed is rather where
the Romans did not penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding the
southern boundary of Europe, the wall of the Atlas, against the
wandering tribes of the sand. There is a fine story of a French
commander who, having taken his column with great efforts through a
defile where certainly men had never marched before, was proud, and sent
a party to chisel the number of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock
above them, but when the men had reached it they saw in deep clear
letters, cut long before, “The IIIrd Legion. The August. The
Victorious.”
[Sidenote: Verecunda]
Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome which a man sees in less than
twenty days on foot in any part of Algiers, consider this. Beyond
Lamboesis, the frontier town of the Legionaries, with only a range of
hills between it and the Sahara, there was a little town or village. It
was quite small and a long way off from the city. It was of no
importance; we have no record of it. Except that its name was Verecunda,
we know nothing about it. One of its citizens, being grateful that he
was born in his native place, thought he would give the little town or
village a gate worthy of the love he bore it, and he built an arch all
inspired with the weightiness of Rome.
The little town has gone. There is not a single stone of it left. But as
you come round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under the height of
Aurès, you have before you this great thing, as though it were on the
Campagna or carefully railed round in some very wealthy city.
[Sidenote: The Great Arch]
It is all alone. The wind blows through it off the mountains. Every
winter the frost opens some new little crack, and every generation or so
a stone falls. But in two thousand years not so much has been ruined by
time, but that the impression of Rome remains: its height, its
absoluteness, and its strength. And this example is but one of very many
that a man might choose as he wandered up and down the high steppes and
through the gorges of the hills.
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: The Berbers]
As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole
place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to
see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta
with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns
re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in
Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and
very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might
be fulfilled.
Rome not only governed, but also made, Africa. The foundations on which
the Maghreb is laid, and to which it must return, are Roman; the Berber
race was no conscious part of us. I have said that it did not know
itself until the Romans came, and when they came the Berbers slipped
into the Roman unity more slowly and with more political friction, (but
with less rebellion and therefore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the
Gauls. There is no more symbolic picture in the history of the Maghreb
than the picture of Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that Massinissa,
his ally, the king of the nomads who rode without stirrups or bridle.
[Sidenote: The Arabs]
The Berbers were not destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something
barbaric in them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted
in these men (though they were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius
for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose. That
Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and that even when Africa
accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history. Africa has always
stood to the rest of the Empire as a sort of ne’er-do-weel: a younger
son perpetually asking for adventure and rejecting discipline. To this
the Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid. Like Britain, Africa
was cut off from the mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined in the
disruption of the Empire to lose the Roman idiom and the traditions of
orderly life; but with this difference, that Britain was reconquered by
the religion and the manner of Europe within three generations of its
loss: Africa was finally invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the
City and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade which
galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The Arabs came in the
seventh century, like a sort of youth contemptuous of the declining head
of Rome. Barbary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian language
and religion in one cavalry charge, and that language and religion not
only became immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve
hundred years in which to take root and make a soil.
For about five hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord
to the close of the sixth century, our culture had been universal among
the Berbers. In the last three centuries the Faith was dominant. But
rebellion was in them, and when the Arabs came the whole edifice
suddenly crumbled.
Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather
obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was
like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a
breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the
periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even
than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had
admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been
thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did
no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a
little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul,
Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay
and to attain their own civilisation again after the repose of the Dark
Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, when all the remainder of the west
had fallen, when Italy was already taxed and half governed by a few
Germans, when Gaul and Spain had at their heads small bands of mixed
barbarian and Roman nobles, and when everything seemed gone to ruin,
this southern shore of the Mediterranean was overwhelmed and, what is
more, persuaded.
There came riding upon it out of the desert continual lines of horsemen
whom these horsemen of Numidia could mix with and understand. The
newcomers wore the white wrapping of the south: all their ways were
southern ways, suited to the intensity of the sun, and Barbary, or the
main part of it, was southern and burning. Their eyes were very bright,
and in their ornaments the half-tamed tribesmen recognised an old
appetite for splendour. For all the effect of Rome perhaps one-third of
the African provincials were still nomadic when the Arabs appeared, and
that nomadic part was thickest towards the desert from which the
invasion came; the invaders themselves were nomads, and even on the
shore of the Maghreb, where men had abandoned the nomadic habit, the
instinct of roving still lingered.
Islam, therefore, when it first came in, tore up what Rome had planted
as one tears up a European shrub planted in the friable soil of Africa.
The Bedawin, as they rode, bore with them also a violent and simple
creed. And here, again, a metaphor drawn from the rare vegetation of
this province can alone define the character of their arrival. Their
Faith was like some plant out of the solitudes; it was hard in surface;
it was simple in form; it was fitted rather to endure than to grow. It
was consonant with the waterless horizons and the blinding rocks from
which it had sprung. Its victory was immediate. Before Charlemagne was
born the whole fabric of our effort in Barbary, the traditions of St.
Augustine and of Scipio, had utterly disappeared. No one from that time
onwards could build a Roman arch of stone or drive a straight road from
city to city or recite so much as the permanent axioms of the Roman Law.
Elsewhere, in Syria and in Asia and in Spain, the Mohammedans failed to
extirpate Christianity, and were able for some centuries to enjoy the
craftsmanship and the sense of order which their European subjects could
lend them. It was only here, in Africa, that their victory was complete.
Therefore it is only here, in Africa, that you see what such a victory
meant, and how, when it was final, all power of creation disappeared.
The works which have rendered Islam a sort of lure for Europe were works
that could not have been achieved save by European hands.
The Roman towns did not decay; they were immediately abandoned.
Gradually the wells filled; the forests were felled in bulk; none were
replanted. Of the Olive Gardens, the stone presses alone remain. One may
find them still beneath the sand, recalling the fat of oil. But there,
to-day, not a spear of grass will grow, and the Sahara has already crept
in. The olives long ago were cut down for waste, or for building or for
burning. There was not in any other province of the empire so complete
an oblivion, nor is there any better example of all that “scientific”
history denies: for it is an example of the cataclysmic—of the complete
and rapid changes by which history alone is explicable: of the folly of
accepting language as a test of origin: of the might and rapidity of
religion (which is like a fire): of its mastery over race (which is like
the mastery of fire over the vessels it fuses or anneals): of the
hierarchic nature of conquest: of the easy destruction of more complex
by simpler forms....
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Atlas]
If one is to understand this surprising history of Barbary, and to know
both what the Romans did in it and what the Arabs did, and to grasp what
the reconquest has done or is attempting to do, it is necessary to
examine the physical nature of this land.