Part 14
Again, the Spaniards are united by that profound historical memory which is a necessity to all nations and a peculiar asset in those who retain it alive. We in this country feel the appetite for an historical memory; we attempt to satisfy that appetite by the creation of legends; we call ourselves "Anglo-Saxons"--there is even, I believe, a notable body which will have us descended from the ten Lost Tribes. The French satisfy that appetite by recurrent experiences: the reign of the Grand Monarque, the Revolution, 1870. Glorious or tragic, each national experience gives a new impetus to the historic memory of the French people. Not so the Spaniard. All Spain is bound together by the enormous recollection of the Reconquista. Here is a province in which the Faith and the Roman Order were not recovered by persuasion (as was the case with Britain) nor were utterly lost (as was the case with Africa for so long) but were got back mile by mile as the prize of hard fighting. That fighting was, so to speak, the very trade of the Spaniards, from the time when Charlemagne was a little boy to the time when Henry VIII was a little boy. All the story of our European growth, the time when we were made, the time which is to the French the accomplishment of their unity, to the English the foundation of their institutions, to the Italians the development of their art, that to the Spaniard is the story of the Reconquista. And the Middle Ages, which have impressed themselves upon every European nation as the glorious transition of youth impresses itself upon the sad memory of a man, stand to the Spaniard for the Reconquista. This has nothing to do with his knowledge of names or with what is called "Education." It is in the blood. The best proof of its result is this, that the Englishman invariably says of the Spaniard that, while other nations show differences of manner changing from class to class, the Spaniard is always a "gentleman." The word "gentleman" is a very meagre word, but on the whole the man who uses it best means the tradition of the Middle Ages, and especially of the fighting men which the Middle Ages produced, and the Spaniard everywhere shows the external qualities of those men. For instance, you cannot insult him with impunity, and that characteristic, though we often write it down, is one which in other nations is somewhat rare. Take the modern for all in all, and outside Spain, if you insult him he will usually argue.
Finally, the Spaniards are bound together by their isolation. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, different as province is from province, you feel everywhere something quite separate from that which lies north of the Pyrenees, and from the Pyrenees on, all over the west of Europe. Roads are an exception, paths the rule; the hours of meals, the very habit in the wearing of the clothes, the form of salutation, the mule taking the place of the horse, the perceptible restraint in every kind of converse, all these mark out the harsh soil which lends a perpetual note of nobility to the story of Europe. No man who has known Spain but would be able to say, if he were taken there blindfold, and suddenly shown his surroundings, "This is Spain." The frontier is sharp, the division clear, the isolation absolute.
The limits of these few pages forbid me a thousand things in this respect. I wish I could describe (for instance) how there is in every Spanish building, from the least to the greatest, something at once severe and strange. Bowling into that great harbour of Barcelona one sees the Customs House, a building with wings. Coming over the northern slopes of the Guadarrama one sees Segovia sailing out in some immortal way as though the cathedral and palace intended to attempt the air. Spain lives, and will revive by such imaginations.
It should be added, by way of closing these few notes, that the Spanish man is not only silent (which is perhaps a fault in him) but square, and so healthy in his limbs and in his mind that when he is rested and can speak again something will be changed in Europe.
THE FORTRESS
There is a province of Europe where a dead plain stretches out upon every side. It is not very extended if you judge by the map alone, it is perhaps but twenty-five or thirty miles from its centre to either of its boundary ranges; but to the eye it seems infinite, for it lies under that grey weather of the North in which the imagination exaggerates distance and so easily conceives imaginary flatnesses extending everywhere beyond the mist of the horizon.
In the midst of this plain there rises most abruptly a little market town. It stands upon a conical hill some 300 feet in height, and the impression it gives of being a rock or an island is enhanced by the height of its buildings, which, as is the case with nearly all mediæval work, are designed for a general effect, and are, whether consciously or unconsciously, as well planned and grouped as though one artist had sketched the whole and had left an inviolable design to posterity.
In this little town I had business some years ago to stop for the night, and when the next morning I found that there were two hours between my breakfast and my train I walked out on to the crest of the hill to see the view and to think about the past. It was autumn; the many artificially aligned trees which bordered the winding, deserted avenues all round the edge of the height were losing their leaves; the air was singularly clear, and the effect of the small but isolated height upon which one stood was very strong. I came to the north-eastern corner of the huge ramparts which still surround the little place, and there I found a most interesting man. He was upon the border between what are called now-a-days middle age and old age; that is, he was an old man, and if he lived would soon be a very old man. He was erect and spare; he was short, and he had all the bearing of a man who has been perpetually trained, and, indeed, I found out when I got to know him better that he had seen service in Africa and in Russia and in Mexico, three very distant places. He had never, however, risen beyond the rank of colonel; he was a gunner, and exceedingly poor, and he was finishing his life alone in this little town. They gave him meals at the hotel for a sum agreed upon between them. Where he lodged he did not choose to tell me, but I fancy in some very cheap and ruinous little room under one of the big Flemish roofs of the place. His only pleasure was to take these walks about the town, to read his newspaper before it was twenty-four hours old, and to remember the trade in which he had been engaged.
We sat together on the very edge of the rampart, and I asked him, since it was his business to know so much about these things, whether the place would ever in his opinion enter once again into the scheme of European war.
He told me that this was absolutely certain; he said there was no field so small nor no village so forgotten, but in its cycle was swept by one or other of those armies which the peoples of Europe send out one against the other, pursuing various ends. This little town in which we sat had never seen an enemy for over two hundred years; yet there beneath us was the enormous evidence of its past. The trench was like a street fifty feet or sixty feet deep, as the house fronts of a street are, as wide at least as the narrow streets of any of these old towns, and on the further side the enormous heap of earth, and beyond it the level descent of the glacis. Here was a town not larger than some of our smaller English cathedral towns, Ely for instance, yet having round it such a mighty effort and proof of military determination as would to-day seem worthy of a great city. These fortifications ran all round the place, the two only gates in and out of it (through which ran the great road which linked the stronghold with the capital) were flanked by such works as the great modern forts occasionally show, and upon every point of its circumference one perceived the fixed will of a crushing Government responsible for all the destinies of a nation that this place should be inviolable.
My companion said to me: "Many men choose many things as their examples of the way in which nothing human can remain, and to most men the best example is the change of taste in art or letters. They point out how great buildings put up with infinite care by men who loved them with all their souls seem tawdry to an immediate posterity; and they wonder why verse which was supreme in their childhood is ridiculed in their old age. But to me the most formidable proof of our futility is to be found in works such as these. They succeed each other all over Europe. Long before our written record began you have the Cyclopæan Wars; what you can see in Tuscany and further east in the Mediterranean. You have the Roman entrenchments, and the mediæval castles, and the new system of Vauban which the Italians created, and of which this earthquake before us is the finest work. And each in its turn bears on into its future the stamp of futility. Something changes in man: he makes a new weapon (or he forgets the old), he develops a new method of attack or a different mood in connection with war; nay, his very desires in the matter of victory change, for he will desire in one generation glory, and in another profit, and in a third the mere occupation of a particular piece of sacred land. And as these human things change in him, so the fortification of his cities become like garments out of fashion and are useless for their purpose and are thrown aside."
"You might then say," said I, "that those who fortify to-day are foolish; and, for that matter, you might add that those who have fortified in the past were foolish. For since each in turn is proved to be wrong with regard to the future, each generation might have spared itself this enormous labour."
"You are right when you call it enormous labour," said he, "but you are wrong when you say that it was ever futile. What a labour it is only those know who have looked closely into and meditated upon the fortifications of the past. The chalk hills and ramparts thrown up upon them by men perhaps who could use no spade and who depended for carriage upon baskets, which we to-day, when we estimate them in a modern method, reckon in fantastic sums of money; and this was done to defend, we know not what, by men every record of whom has perished. The ancient walls of the cities are much the largest and the strongest buildings they can boast, and much the most enduring. The transformation of a city two hundred years ago and more, when hardly a frontier place of Europe but had its elaborate system of main and out works, proves the same labour. Consider little Bayonne, never other than a little town, and yet flanked with a work which must have meant more than the building of a modern railway. And then, lastly, consider to-day the great garrisons circled with forts: Spezia and Metz, and the French frontier garrisons, and Antwerp and the line of the Meuse. And even, at the far ends of the world, Port Arthur, which, though it was never finished, was to have been among the greatest of all. Yes, it is a toil if you like, and that is why those who court defeat by boasting shirk it or ridicule it."
"But they are right to ridicule it," said I, "since time itself ridicules the walls of a city, and since it can be shown that no city has been made impregnable."
"You use a false argument," he insisted; "it is as though you were to say that because all men die therefore no man should live. These trenches and these walls and these circles of isolated forts to-day procure for men who fight under their shoulder a draft upon Time. That is what fortification is, and that is why all who have ever understood the art of war have fortified; and all who, upon the contrary, have in one way or another failed to understand the art of war, whether because they secretly desired to avoid arms or whether because they believed themselves invincible (which is the most unmilitary mood in the world!) have failed to fortify."
"I have heard it said," I answered him, "in the schools where such things are taught, that the Romans, as they were the chief masters of war, were also the most plodding in the use of the spade, and that not only would they fortify permanently every military post, but that they cast up a square fieldwork round them every night, wherever the army rested."
The little spare old gunner shrugged his shoulders. "They would have found it awkward," he said, "to do that in the case of a single battery quartered during manoeuvres in a country house. But in general you are right: the Romans, who were the great masters of the art of war, thought of the spade and of the sword as of twin brothers, only the sword was the more noble, and in a fashion the elder of the two. At any rate, certainly those who are in the tradition of the Romans perpetually fortify...." Then he asked me abruptly: "Since you are a foreigner and since you say that you have travelled (for I had told him of my travels when we made acquaintance), have you not noticed that wherever men are boastful or inept they despise fortifications, and that it is absent, and that the bases of their military action, their depots, their political centres, their harbours and dockyards lie open?"
"I cannot tell," I answered, "for I have no knowledge of such things."
"Well, you find it is so," he said, and he walked away. He was much ruder and more long-winded than if he had been in the Cavalry, but you cannot have everything at once.
THE HUNTER
One day I had occasion to travel, at the expense of a fund more or less public, and certainly collective, in a railway train of which the carriages were _wagons-de-luxe_. It was by its description a train for the Very Rich, yet few of that numerous class were travelling in it, for it was going in the depth of winter from one of the most desolate highlands of Europe to another of Europe's most offensive deserts. I had business with one and the other.
There was in the dining-car of this luxurious train a gentleman who sat opposite me. He was dressed, as are so many of his class, in boots and striped trousers and a black coat and waistcoat. He had on a quiet tie of grey silk and what is called upon the Continent an English collar. He was nearly bald, but his eyes were determined, and his moustaches were of the shape and seemed to be of the size of buffalo's horns. They were of a metallic colour and looked like steel.
It is the custom on the Continent of Europe for males when they meet to accost each other, even if they have not been introduced, as indeed is the custom (if you will observe it narrowly) of the mass of the population at home. There is, indeed, a story of a man who stood upon the bridge at Lyons wringing his hands and shouting out as he gazed upon the arrowy Rhone which was bearing down very rapidly a drowning human head: "Will no one introduce me to that gentleman that I may save him? For I am an excellent swimmer." But this story would not apply to the mass of males upon the Continent. We therefore were ready to accost each other. He spoke to me in a curious language which I believed to be Hungarian--for though I do not know Basque I should have recognised the Basque terminations, and Finnish would not be used in the West of Europe, and save for Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish all other tongues have something in common. The Teutonic dialects, though they are infinite, can at once be distinguished, and a Russian does not address you in his own tongue in a foreign country. When, therefore, this stranger man had spoken to me in this tongue which I believed to be Hungarian, I replied to him gently in the Limousin dialect as being the most southern with which I had any acquaintance, and upon the principle, that with foreigners the more southern you are the better chance you have. He answered in pure Italian, which is of no use to me. I spoke to him then in the French of Paris, which he understood ill, but did not speak at all. At last we tumbled upon a mutual language, which, for the honour I bear you, I will not name; but it was neither Latin nor Arabic, nor the language of the Genoese; and if I called it lingua franca you would feel a legitimate annoyance.
We had not spoken of many things before he told me his own characteristics, which were these: that he was a brave man but modest; that he had a contempt for riches, and was content to live upon the small income derivable from funds inherited from his father; that he revered the memory of his father; that he was devoted to his mother, "who lived in a modest way in a provincial town, hating the extravagance of the capital. He further told me that he had been by profession a soldier, and upon my asking whether his stoical life were not diversified by some amusement he answered that he had permitted himself certain recreations, but only those befitting the uniform he wore, and notably was he addicted to the chase of wild and powerful beasts.
"It is often remarked," he said, "by those who know nothing of the business, that modern firearms have made the destruction of the larger carnivora too easy a task for the sportsman. This may in general be the case, but only if men are fighting under luxurious conditions. A man going out by himself with his gun, unaccompanied by a dog, and determined upon the destruction of some one considerable four-footed beast of prey, still runs a certain risk."
"You are right," said I, "and a relative of mine who under such conditions attempted the bear, though having only designed to attempt wild-fowl, in the impenetrable thickets of Scandinavia, was very bitterly disappointed and has been lamed for life."
At this my companion was a little put out. "The bear is not carnivorous," he said, "and a brave man should be able to tackle a bear with his hands. I really cannot understand how your relative (as you call him), if he had a fowling-piece or even so much as a pocket-pistol with a range of ten yards, could not shoot off a bear.... But to return to my original thesis, which is that the larger carnivora are really dangerous to a man walking alone, however well armed he may be. It was so armed but undefended by companions that I found myself on the borders of the Indian Ocean five years ago...."
"Which border of that vast sea did you inhabit?" said I with some curiosity, and I was beginning to make a list of all its boundaries, including the magnificent but undeveloped districts which fringe the north-west of the great island of Australia, when he went on as though I had not spoken--
" ... A tiger, or, I should rather say, a tigress, growled in the dense underwood, and I was immediately upon the alert."
"Knowledge," I replied, "is a remarkable thing; it amazes me and my friends who are familiar with the classics, though I believe there is very little to know in that department. Even the chemists astonish me, and the people who talk technically about warships are remarkable men; but I see that in your case, as in that of so many others, I have more to learn with every day I live, for there came a growl from the underwood and you knew it to be that of a tiger--nay, of a tigress. But," I continued, lifting my hand as he would interrupt me, "though it fills me with admiration it does not make me hesitate, for I know men who can talk a language after passing a week in the country to which it is native, and I beg you to fulfil my curiosity."
"I heard the growl of a tigress," said he, eager to continue his narrative, "proceeding from the underwood, which is called in that country _rawak_."
"Why is it called _rawak_?" I interrupted.
"Because," he explained, with an intelligent look, "it is composed of _mera_ roots and _sinchu_ closely interlaced, with a screen of reeds ten feet high or more waving above it."
I told him that I now perfectly understood and desired to hear more.
"I heard," said he, "the growl of a tigress, and I at once made ready my arm and prepared for the worst."
"When you say made ready your arm" (I again interrupted him) "I want to seize the matter clearly, for the interest of your tale absorbs me--what exactly did you do to the instrument, for I am acquainted with a certain number of firearms, and each has to be prepared in a different manner?"
"I pulled the bolt," said he coldly, and then maintained rather an offended silence.
"Did you not snap the safety catch?" said I, in some fear that I had put him out by my cross-examination.
"No, sir," said he, "my rifle (for such it was) was adorned by no such appliance. But I pulled the spring ratchet home. And by way of precaution I pressed my thumb upon the main-pin for fear that the ratchet of the cambor should slip from the second groove."
"Now I understand you perfectly," I said, "and I beg you to continue." And as I said this I leaned my head upon my hand so far as the jolting of the express train would allow me, and watched him with a thoughtful frown.
"Well, sir," went on the Unknown in an independent manner, "if you will believe me, when the beast sprang I missed him--I mean her."
"One moment," I said, "one moment. I cannot believe you. You mean that you missed some vital spot. That you missed so enormous an animal in mid-air, as large as a cottage, and in full career to bear you down, fraught with death, with pain, and with defeat, spreading its arms like windmills, and roaring to announce its approach--that I will not believe."
"You are right," said he, eyeing me in an iron manner, "I did not wholly miss the ferocious monster--or rather, monstress. When we sportsmen say 'miss' we mean hitting some part of the animal which is not vital or which still permits it to pursue its abominable purpose. At any rate the tigress (for such it was) fell to earth within a few feet of me. It did not reach me. It had miscalculated its spring...."
"It is a curious point," said I (always desirous to pursue a conversation and to prolong it), "how difficult it is for a man, or a beast for that matter, to estimate the distance which he has to jump. I well remember trying to jump the River Rother, which is near the eastern boundary of my own county...."
"You will allow me," he interrupted.
"No, sir," I continued, "pray let me tell you what I had to say, for it is in my mind and I wish to be rid of it. I well remember, I say, trying to jump the River Rother and missing by three feet, but if you will believe me----"
"Will you allow me?" he said, a little angrily.
"In a moment, sir," said I, "in a moment.... Well, I say I missed it by three feet, and many a friend of mine has missed things by a little minus, but the funny thing is that they never miss it by a little plus. Now, isn't that worth judging? I did indeed know one case...."
"I am determined you shall allow me," said my companion, becoming earnest.
"One moment," I pleaded, lifting my right hand slightly from the table. "I was once with a man who had to jump from an old piece of fortification on to the top of a wall about ten feet off, and if he jumped not far enough he fell into the soft ditch about five feet deep. But if he jumped too far he fell into an enormous fosse a hundred feet deep. And, by the Lord, he jumped exactly three inches too far! Poor devil!... Now, if this tigress of yours had only jumped just over your head you would have had her at a disadvantage. You could have changed your front with the rapidity familiar to men of your profession, organised a concentrated fire against her just as she was executing her turning movement, and got her behind the shoulder-blade. But...."