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 [pg 237]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.
[pg 238]
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.
[pg 239]
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[pg 240] 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,[pg 241] 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[pg 242] do that in the case of a single battery quartered during manœuvres 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.
