Part 6

He looked at it very patiently and carefully, but at the end of so looking at it he said: "I do not understand these things. I do not belong to the High Map-making Corps; I belong to the Spy Corps, and I have orders to draw this Fort." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.

Then, seeing I could not persuade him, I went into a neighbouring church which is dedicated to the Patron of Spies, to wit, St. Judas, and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus:

"Oh, St. Judas! Soften the flinty heart of this Spy, and turn him, by your powerful intercession, from his present perfectly useless occupation of drawing the Old Round Stone Fort to something a little more worthy of his distinguished mission and the gallant profession he adorns."

When I had prayed thus diligently for half an hour something within me told me that it was useless, and when I got back to the seashore I found out what the trouble was. Prayers went off my little man like water off a cabbage-leaf. My little man with hair like hemp was a No-Goddite, for he so explained to me in a conversation we had upon the Four Last Things.

"I have done my drawing," he said at the end of this conversation (and he said it in a tone of great satisfaction). "Now I shall go back to Germany."

"No," said I, "you shall do nothing of the kind. I will have you tried first in a court, and you shall be sent to prison for being a Spy."

"Very well," said he, and he came with me to the court.

The Magistrate tried him, and did what they call in the newspapers "looking very grave," that is, he looked silly and worried. At last he determined not to put the Spy in prison because there was not sufficient proof that he was a Spy.

"Although," he added, "I have little doubt but that you have been prying into the most important military secrets of the country."

After that I took the Spy out of court again and gave him some dinner, and that night he went back home to Germany with his drawing of the Old Round Stone Fort.

It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing business, but that is their look-out. _They_ think they are efficient, and _we_ think they are efficient, and when two people of opposite interests are agreed on such a matter it is not for third parties to complain.

XV

THE YOUNG PEOPLE

One of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon these fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to wonder if they are what I was at their age.

There is an element in human life which the philosophers have neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name has been coined for it. But I am not at a loss to describe it. It is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective, or in point of view. It is that change which makes Death so recognisable and too near; achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more than that. It is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them, which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now palpable and part of the senses: known. All who have passed a certain age know what I mean.

This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth; and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young.

There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself immortal, I wonder, as I did? Does the thought of oblivion appal him as it did me? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture, I can well believe, for that is common to all youth. But does he also, as did I and those of my time, purpose great things which are quite unattainable, and think the summit of success in any art to be the natural wage of living?

Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy all our old illusions? Do they think the country invincible? Do they vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night? Are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do? I wonder!--Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street. And is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three periods: their childhood; their much more important years at a public school (which last fill up most of their consciousness); their new untried occupation?

And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognised and best paid; that labour is a happy business; and that women are of two kinds: the young who go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent.

Do they drink? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble? I conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound? Of that there can be no doubt! See them hop on and off the motor 'buses and cross the streets!

And what of their attitude towards the labels? Do they take, as I did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they diffident when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all social lies is Gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all the rest of England in a ruck below.

Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used all to be so bewildered! Things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery that of _these_ men and of _such_ material the Great are made; and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders?

I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the young man walking down Cockspur Street (he has got to Northumberland Avenue by now), lives in a static world. For him things are immovable. There are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul, and as yet unbetrayed.

Well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world is happy. Not one of that happy half remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the little streets there were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works.

And for them, all the new things--houses which are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels--are the things that always were and always will be.

A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal, but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.

Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the Young also are caught with the obsession of change? Why, then, not even half the world is happy.

XVI

ETHANDUNE

In the parish of East Knoyle, in the county of Wiltshire, and towards the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet above the sea in height. From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward over a great rising roll of countryside.

To the west, upon the sky-line of a level range of hills, not high, runs that long wood called Selwood and there makes an horizon. To the north the cultivated uplands merge into high open down: bare turf of the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the watershed between the Northern and the Southern Avon. Eastward that chalk land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.

From this high knoll a man perceives the two days' march which Alfred made with his levies when he summoned the men of three Shires to fight with him against the Danes; he overthrew them at Ethandune.

The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has imperilled the survival of either between the Roman time and our own.

That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare, and in which its continued life (individually the living memory of the Empire and informed by the Faith) was most in peril, was not the generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that which witnessed the breaking of the Mahommedan tide in the eighth, when the Christians carried it through near Poitiers, between the River Vienne and the Chain, the upland south of Chatellerault. The gravest moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could remember the order of Charlemagne, and which fought its way desperately through the perils of the later ninth century.

Then it was, during the great Scandinavian harry of the North and West, that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was shaken; its relics of central government were perishing of themselves; letters had sunk to nothing and building had already about it something nearly savage, when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers. And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were conscious of our past and of our inheritance, and seemed to feel that now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed: a bridge already nearly ruined.

If that bridge were not crossed there would be no future for Christendom.

Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it, were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we know. At Ethandune and before Paris the double business was decided. Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in this island. Alfred is its hero, and its site is that chalk upland, above the Vale of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved: the hills above Eddington and Bratton upon the Westbury road.

The Easter of 878 had seen no King in England. Alfred was hiding with some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the Severn sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which Christendom has re-arisen. In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.

There is a place at the southern terminal of the great wood, Selwood, which bears a Celtic affix, and is called "Penselwood," "the head of the forest," and near it there stood (not to within living memory, but nearly so) a shire-stone called Egbert's Stone; there Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just eastward of the gap by which men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the levies, that is the lords of Somerset and of Wiltshire and their followers, come also riding from Hampshire, met the King. But many had fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.

"And seeing the King, as was meet, come to life again as it were after such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense joy, and there the camp was pitched."

Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the barbarians who had ruined half the West.

Day was just breaking when the levies set forth and made for the uplands and for the water partings. Not by mere and the marshes of the valley, but by the great camp of White Sheet and the higher land beyond it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the King across the open turf of the chalk to where three Hundreds meet, and where the gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the Counts had been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land.

It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree which marked the junction of the Hundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this tree still stood and bore the name of the Iley Oak. The place of that day's camp stands up above the water of Deveril, and is upon the continuation of that Roman road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from the great Ridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the second camp was pitched.

With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made.

The whole of that way (which should be famous in every household in this country) is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the high rolling land of the Downs from summit to summit until--from that central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury--they saw before them, directly northward and a mile away, the ring of earthwork which is called to-day "Bratton Castle." Upon the slope between the great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there from those naked heights that overlook the great plain of the Northern Avon, that the fate of England was decided.

The end of that day's march and action was the pressing of the Pagans back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great society sat down before the ringed embankment watching all the gates of it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection and rounding up the stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.

That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the Northmen treatied, conquered "by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred took hostages "as many as he willed." Guthrum, their King, accepted our baptism, and Britain took that upward road which Gaul seven years later was to follow when the same anarchy was broken by Eudes under the walls of Paris.

All this great affair we have doubtfully followed to-day in no more than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfully over a thousand years. But the thing happened where and as I have said. It should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of the Republic established our exalted but perilous modern day.

XVII

THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG

Up in the higher valley of the River Sarthe, which runs between low knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older servants in the chief men's retinue could remember Charlemagne.

Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land, and each possessed of commissions from the Imperial authority. The one had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, the other had marched westward to join him, coming from the Beauce, with his command. Each was a _Comes_, a Lord Administrator of a countryside and its capital, and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.

The force had already marched far that morning. It was winding in line down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside, and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates. The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the rare peasantry were confused.

They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound roughly with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had seen the straggling line of the Northern men an hour before, hurrying over the Down and coming towards that farm.

Of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong, rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. Could he guess the numbers? It might be two hundred; it was not three. How long had they been in the countryside? Four days, at least. It was four days ago that they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard. His cousin from up the valley complained that three oxen had been driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more--how much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three, whom he had helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to dig the graves.

The lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. He had taken off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point. He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its action than to be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this though at any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of the barbarians.

Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through all the North of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage, but vague stories went about--that his father was from the Germanies; that his father was from the Paris land; that it was his mother who had brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the Emperor had enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's son; a yeoman.

On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men or women of his blood. But ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of the empire, adding, also, one village to another in his possession, from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land with the profits of office after office. He had been _Comes_ of Tours, _Comes_ of Auxerre, _Comes_ of Nevers. He had the commission for all the military work between Loire and Seine. There were songs about him, and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the populace most wondered.

So this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken. Immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the goal of the pirates--and there they were! They had seen the imperial levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running--tall, lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe or short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of the village.

Immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed, formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into the streets of the place.

Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. He fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the doors. Then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just missing one of the marshals. The Comes of Poitiers shouted for wood to burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were pressed. Faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at short range from within the church-tower.

The first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased, then came another arrow from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and he went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next, with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.

Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone so huge that even at such a moment they marvelled at him.