First and Last Part 9

All the great men who saluted his advent are dead. Theophile Gautier, who first established his fame; Hugo, who addressed to him, perhaps, that vigorous appeal in which strict labour is deified, and the medal and the marble bust are shown to outlive the greatest glories, are sometimes quoted as the last among the great French writers.

The immediate future will show that the stream of French excellence in this department, as in any other of human activity, is full, deep, and steady. The work of Heredia will help to prove it. He was a Spaniard, and a Colonial Spaniard. No other nation, perhaps, except the modern French, so inherit the romantic appet.i.te of the later Roman Empire as to be able to mould and absorb every exterior element of excellence. It is remarkable that at the same moment Paris contemplated the funeral of the Italian de Brazza and the death of the Cuban Heredia. It is probable that those of us who are still young will live to see either name at the head of a new tradition. Heredia proved it possible not so much to imitate as to recapture the secure tradition of an older time. Perhaps the truest generalization that can be made with regard to the French people is to say that they especially in Western Europe (whose quality it is ever to transform itself but never to die) discover new springs of vitality after every period of defeat and aridity which they are compelled to cross. Heredia will prove in the near future a capital example of this power. He will increase silently in reputation until we, in old age, shall be surprised to find our sons and grandsons taking him for granted and speaking of him as one speaks of the Majores, of the permanent lights of poetry.

Normandy and the Normans

There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one could understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius of the counties--Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward by the belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of Stockport; Suss.e.x, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent, Devon, the East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern England who does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great industrial towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of such towns--with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the rest.

France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French development that these are not small territories mainly of an average extent with government answerable in a long day's ride to one centre, such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_, differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like the Bourbonnais or the Perigord.

The real continuity with an immemorial past which inspires all Gallic things is discoverable in this arrangement of Gaul. At the first glance one might imagine a French province to be a chance growth of the feudal ties and of the Middle Ages. A further effort of scholarship will prove it essentially Roman. An intimate acquaintance with its customs and with the site of its strongholds, coupled with a comparison of the most recent and most fruitful hypotheses of historians, will convince you that it is earlier than the Roman conquest; it is tribal, or the home of a group of cognate tribes, and its roots are lost in prehistory. So it is with Normandy.

This vast territory--larger (I think) than all North England from the Humber to Cheviot and from Chester to the Solway--has never formed a nation. It is typical of the national idea in France that Normandy should have "held" of the political centre of the country, probably since the first Gallic confederations were formed, certainly since the organization of the Empire. It is equally typical of the local life of a French province that, thus dependent, Normandy should have strictly preserved its manner and its spirit, and should have readily made war upon the Crown and resisted, as it still resists and will perhaps for ever, the centralizing forces of the national temper.

If you will travel day after day, and afoot, westward across the length of Normandy, you will have, if you are a good walker, a fortnight's task ahead of you; even if you are walking for a wager, a week's. It is the best way in which to possess a knowledge of that great land, and my advice would be to come in from the Picards over the bridge of Aumale across the little River Bresle (which is the boundary of Normandy to the east), and to go out by way of Pontorson, there crossing into Brittany over the little River Couesnon, which is the boundary of Normandy upon the west and beyond which lie the Bretons. In this way will you be best acquainted with the sharp differentiation of the French provinces pa.s.sing into Normandy from Picardy, brick-built, horse-breeding, and slow, pa.s.sing out of Normandy into the desolation and dreams of Brittany, and having known between the one and the other the chalk streams, the day-long beechen forests, the valley pastures, and the flamboyant churches of the Normans. You will do well to go by Neufchatel, where the cheese is made, and by Rouen, then by Lisieux to Falaise, where the Conqueror was born, and thence by Vive to Avranches and so to the Breton border, taking care to choose the forests between one town and another for your road, since these many and deep woods--much wider than any we know in England--are in great part the soul of the country.

By this itinerary you will not have taken all you should into view; you will not have touched the coast nor seen how Normandy is based upon the sea, and you will not have known the Cotentin, which is a little State of its own and is the quadrilateral which Normandy thrusts forth into the Channel. If you have the leisure, therefore, return by the north.

Pa.s.s through Coutances and Valognes to Cherbourg, thence through Caen and Bayeux to the crossing of Seine at Honfleur, and then on by the chalk uplands and edges of the cliffs till you reach Eu upon the Bresle again. In such a double journey the character of the whole will be revealed, and if you have studied the past of the place before starting you will find your journey full. Avranches, Coutances, Lisieux, Bayeux, Rouen are not chance sites. Their great churches mark the bishoprics; the bishoprics in turn were the administrative centres of Rome, and Rome chose them because they were the strongholds or the sacred cities each of a Gallic tribe. The wealth of the valleys permitted everywhere that astonishing richness of detail which marks the stonework in village after village; the connexion with England, especially the last connexion under Henry V, explains the innumerable churches, splendid even in hamlets as are our own. The Bresle and the Couesnon, those little streams, are boundaries not of these last few centuries, but of a time beyond view; the Romans found them so. Diocletian made them the limits of the "Second Lyonesse," "Lugdunensis Secunda," which was the last Roman name of the province.

Here and there, near the west especially, you will discover names which recall the chief adventure of Normandy, the accident which baptized it with its Christian name, the landing of the Scandinavian pirates, the thousandth anniversary of which is now being celebrated. They came--we cannot tell in what numbers, some thousands--and harried the land. The old policy of the Empire, the policy already seven hundred years old, was had recourse to; the barbarians were granted settlement, inheritance, marriage, and partnership with the Lords of the Villae; their chief was permitted to hold local government, to tax and to levy men as the administrator of the whole province; but there followed something which wherever else the experiment had been tried had not followed: something of a new race arose. In Burgundy, in the northeast, in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse. Few as the newcomers may have been in number, the new element transformed the ma.s.s, and when a century had permitted the union to work and settle, the great soldiers who founded us appeared. The Norman lords ordered, surveyed, codified, and ruled.

They let Europe into England, they organized Sicily, they confirmed the New Papacy, they were the framework of the Crusades.

The phenomenon was brief. It lasted little more than a hundred years, but it transformed Europe and launched the Middle Ages. When it had pa.s.sed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed) in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt, of a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative body of to-day--for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy--and, in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and famous order that "the Normans that day should do their duty."

The Old Things

Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter, about any part of Western Europe, rightly a.s.sociate with such travel the pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were, a great memory of things--like a human memory, but stretched over a far longer s.p.a.ce than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.

It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind--a great ma.s.s of similar stone with solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.

All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied to it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the power to construct and to do--underneath all that is the foundation on which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.

Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie only nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought by men who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we certainly are; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we find, under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving that Canterbury has been there from all time; and that the apparently defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when the water-meadows of the Stour were impa.s.sable as marsh, or with difficulty pa.s.sable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand on the earthwork a few miles west and to say to oneself (as one can say with a fair cert.i.tude), "Here was the British camp defending the south-east; here the tenth legion charged." All these are pleasant, but more pleasant, I think, to follow the thing where it actually survives.

Consider the track-ways, for instance. How rich is England in these! No other part of Europe will afford the traveller so permanent and so fascinating a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and straightened every barbaric trail until the original line and level disappeared; but in this distant province of Britain she could only afford just so much energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and all over England you can go, if you choose, foot by foot, along the ancient roads that were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of brick or of stone or of iron or of written laws.

I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the Fosse-Way. There it runs right across Western England from the south-west to the north-east in a line direct yet sinuous, characters which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for many miles, and you are tramping, let us say, along the Cotswold on a hard metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices from the County Council telling you that the culverts will not bear a steam-engine, if so be you were to travel on one. Then suddenly this road comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what map draughtsmen call a "T"; but right in the same line you see a gate, and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a spinney where a ride has been cut through by the woodreeve, and it is all in the same line. The Fosse-Way turns into a little path, but you are still on it; it curves over a marshy brook-valley, picking out the firm land, and as you go you see old stones put there heaven knows how many (or how few) generations ago--or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition remains, and the country-folk strengthen their wet lands as they have strengthened them all these thousands of years; you climb up out of that depression, you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon a lane. You follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time there is a field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path, nothing but gra.s.s rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the modern decay of the corn lands and pasture--alas!--taking the place of ploughing. Now your pleasure comes in casting about for the trail; you look back along the line of the Way; you look forward in the same line till you find some indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps upon your map, or two or three quarries set together, or some other sign, and very soon you have picked up the line again.

So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you have in the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient purpose and soul of this Kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans marching when they were called Northward to the host; and up this went slow, creaking wagons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of Cornwall or the gold of Wales.

And it is still there; it is still used from place to place as a high road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its peers, as for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and affording problems more rarely; others like the ridgeway of the Berkshire Downs, which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two thousand years has, therefore, made hardly anything; you may spend a delightful day piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making your guess at it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage whether those islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the ford.

The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more; for instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. I remember once being told of a record in a manor, which held of the Church and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so much was entered for "straw from the Lowlands": then, years afterwards, when I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms--a pleasant place to write in, with the noise of bees in the air--the man who came to thatch said to me: "We must have straw from the Lowlands; this upland straw is no good for thatching." Immediately when I heard him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do, Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift of the snow, for there was no other guide to one's direction in such weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea, as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and then went round it on the end of the flood, one caught a new tide up London river, and so made two tides in one day. He spoke with the same pleasure that silly men show when they talk about an acc.u.mulation of money. He felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is older than ten thousand years; and so is the knowledge of how birds fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the moon.

Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans are older than the language or the religion; and the finding of water with a stick; and the catching of that smooth animal, the mole; and the building of flints into mortar, which if one does it in the old way (as you may see at Pevensey) the work lasts for ever, but if you do it in any new way it does not last ten years; then there is the knowledge of planting during the crescent part of the month, but not before the new moon shows; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a less extent upon the brewing of ale; and talking of ale, the knowledge of how ale should be drawn from the brewing just when a man can see his face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called "throwing the rives" in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things and a thousand others. All are immemorial.

The Battle of Hastings. Related in the Manner of Oxford and Dedicated to that University

So careless were the French commanders (or more properly the French commander, for the rest were cowed by the bullying swagger of William) that the night, which should have been devoted to some sort of reconnaissance, if not of a preparation of the ground, was devoted to nothing more practical than the religious exercises peculiar to foreigners.

Their army, as we have seen, was not drawn from any one land, but it was in the majority composed of Normans and Bretons; we can therefore understand the extravagant superst.i.tion which must bear the blame for what followed.

Meanwhile, upon the heights above, the English host calmly prepared for battle. Fires were lit each in its appointed place, and at these meat was cooked under the stern but kindly eyes of the sergeant-majors. These also distributed at an appointed price liquor, of which the British soldier is never willing to be deprived, and as the hours advanced towards morning, the songs in which our adventurous race has ever delighted rose from the heights above the Brede.

The morning was misty, as is often the case over damp and marshy lands in the month of October, but the inclemency of the weather, or, to speak more accurately, the superfluous moisture precipitated from an already saturated atmosphere, was of no effect upon those silent and tenacious troops of Harold. It was far other with the so-called "Norman" host, who were full of forebodings--only too amply to be justified--of the fate that lay before them upon the morrow.

It is curious to contrast the quiet skill and sagacity which marked the disposition of Harold with the almost childish simplicity of William's plan--if plan it may be called.

The Saxon hosts were drawn along the ridge in a position chosen with masterly skill. It afforded (as may still be seen) no dead ground for an attacking force and little cover. [Footnote: The Rhododendrons on the great lawn are modern.] Their left was arranged _en potence_, their right was drawn up in echelon. The centre followed the plan usual at that time, reposing upon the wings to its right and left and extended.

The reserves were, of course, posted behind. Cavalry, as at Omdurman, played but a slight role in this typically national action and such mounted troops as were present seem to have been intermixed with the line in the fashion later known, in the jargon of the service, as "The Beggar's Quadrille." The Brigade of Guards is not mentioned in any record that I can discover, but was probably set by reversed companies in a square perpendicular to the main ravine and a little in front of the salient angle which appears upon the map at the point marked A.

The terrain can be clearly determined at the present day in spite of the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It is a fairly steep slope of hemispherical contour interspersed with low bushes; the summit (upon which now stands our lovely English village of Battle and the residence of one of those cultured and leisured men who form the framework of our commonwealth) was then but a wild heath.

Harold himself could be distinguished in the centre of the line by his handsome features, restrained deportment, and unfailing gentlemanly good sense as he spoke to staff officer, orderly, and even groom with indefatigable skill.

In spite of the determination observable from a great distance upon the faces of the tall Saxon line, William with characteristic lack of balance opened the action by ordering a charge uphill with cavalry alone; it was a piece of tactics absurdly incongruous and one even he would never have attempted had he understood the foe that was before him, or the fate to which that foe had doomed him.

The lesson dealt him was as immediate as it was severe. The foreigners were thrust headlong down the hill, and a private letter tells us how the Men of Kent in particular buffeted the Normans about "as though they were boys." But even in the heat of this initial success Harold had the self-command to order the retirement upon the main position: and with troops such as his the order was equivalent to its execution.

This rude blow would have sufficed for any commander less vain than William, but he seems to have lost all judgment in a fit of personal vanity and to have ordered a second charge which could not but prove as futile as the first, delivered as it was up a perfect glacis strengthened by epaulements, reverses and countersunk galvon work and one whose natural strength was heightened by the stockade which the indomitable energy of Harold's troops had perfected in the early hours of the morning. Many of the stakes in this, the reader may note with pardonable pride, were of English oak--sharpened at the tip.

William's plan (if plan it may be called) was, as we have seen, necessarily futile and was foredoomed to failure. But Harold had no intention to let the action bear no more fruit than a tactical victory upon this particular field. The brain that had designed the exact synchrony of Stamford Bridge and the famous march southward from the Humber was of that sort which is only found once in many centuries of the history of war and which is (it may be said without boasting) peculiar to this island.

Another general would have awaited the second charge with its useless butchery and still more useless contest for the barren name of victory.

Not so Harold. Those commanding, cold grey eyes of his swept the line in a comprehensive glance, and though no written record of the detail remains, he must know little of the character of the man who does not understand that from Harold certainly proceeded the order for what followed.

The forces at the centre, which he commanded in person, deftly withdrew before the futile gallop of William's cavalry, leaving, with that coolness which has ever distinguished our troops, the laggards to their fate. At the same moment, and with marvellous precision, the left and right were withdrawn from the plateau rapidly and as by magic, and the old-fashioned tactics of mere impact (which William of Normandy seems seriously to have relied on!) were spent and wasted upon the now evacuated summit of the hill.

What followed is famous in history.

The cohesion of the Saxon force and the exact.i.tude and coolness with which its great operation was performed is of good augury for the future of our country. Though it was now thick night, by no set road and with no c.u.mbersome machinery of train and rear-guard, the whole of the vast a.s.sembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the Weald.

The Norman hors.e.m.e.n, bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that had fallen in defence of the masking position and wondered whether such novel happenings were victory or no, but the army whose concentration upon the Thames it was William's whole object to prevent, was already miles northward, each unit proceeding by exactly co-ordinated routes towards London.

There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the quiet execution of such a manoeuvre after the heat of a heavy action, and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of Harold.

When (luckily) all the orders had been finally distributed a great tragedy marred the completeness of the day.