First and Last

H >> H. Belloc >> First and Last

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Again, whatever could help the human soul to salvation was by the most
rigorous theological definition of the Middle Ages applicable only
before death. After death the fate of the soul was sealed, and the man
once dead, the "lifeless clay" (as the journalist put it--and the Middle
Ages was the only source from which he got the idea of clay at all),
whether it were that of a Pope or of some random highwayman, had no
effect whatsoever upon the fate of the soul. The greatest saint might
have offered the most solemn sacrifice on its behalf for years, and if
the soul were damned his sacrifice would have been of no avail.

I have taken this example absolutely at random. But the modern reader,
apart from sentences as clearly provocative of criticism as this, is
perpetually coming across references, allusions, and parallels which
take a certain course of human European and English history for granted.
How is he to distinguish when that course is rightly drawn from when it
is wrongly drawn?

Thus in some newspaper article written by an able man, and dealing, let
us say, with the territorial army, one might come across a sentence like
this: "Napoleon himself used troops so raw that they were actually
drilled on the march to the battlefield." That would be a perfectly true
statement. Any amount of criticism of it lies in connexion with Mr.
Haldane's scheme, but still it is a true piece of history. Napoleon did
get raw recruits into his battalions just before any one of his famous
marches began, and drill them on the way to victory. In the next column
of the newspaper the reader may be presented with a sentence like this:
"The captures of English by privateers in the Revolutionary War should
teach us what foreign cruisers can do."

There were plenty of captures by privateers in the Revolutionary Wars;
if I remember rightly, many many hundreds, all discreetly hidden from
the common or garden reader until party politics necessitated their
resurrection a hundred years after the event, but they have nothing
whatsoever to do with modern circumstances.

Both statements are true then, and yet one can be truthfully applied
today, while the other cannot.

How is the plain reader to distinguish between two historical truths,
one of which is a useful modern analogy, the other of which is a
ludicrously misleading one?

The reader, it would seem, has no criterion by which to distinguish what
has been withheld from him and what has been emphasized; he may, from
his knowledge of the historian's character or bias, stand upon his
guard, but he can do little more.

There is another difficulty. It is less subtle and less common, but it
exists. I mean brute lying. You do not often get the lie direct in
official history; it would be too dangerous a game to play in the face
of the critics, though some historians, and notably the French historian
Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated dogmatically, as
historical happenings, things that never happened and that they knew
never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is more commonly
found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the other day, with
regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation alluded to as
comparable with "the pulling out of Jews' teeth for money in the Middle
Ages." When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a Jew's teeth for
money? There is just one very doubtful story told about King John, and
that story is told without proof by one of John's worst enemies, in a
mass of other accusations many of which can be proved to be false.

Again, I turn to an Oxford History of the French Revolution, and I find
the remark that the massacres of September were organized by the men
from Marseilles. They were not organized by the men from Marseilles. The
men from Marseilles had nothing to do with them, and the fact has been
public property since the publication of Pollio and Marcel's monograph
twenty years ago.

What criterion can the ordinary reader choose when he is confronted by
difficulties of this sort? I will suggest to him one which seems to me
by far the most valuable. It is the reading of firsthand authorities. It
is all a matter of habit. When the original authorities upon which
history is based were difficult to get at, when few of those in foreign
tongues had been translated, and when those that had been published were
published in the most expensive form, the ordinary reader had to depend
upon an historian who would summarize for him the reading of another.
The ordinary reader was compelled to read secondary history or none. Now
secondary history is among the most valuable of literary efforts; where
evidence is slight, the judgment of an historian who knows from other
reading the general character of the period, is most valuable. Where
evidence is abundant, and therefore confusing, the historian used to the
selection and weighing of it performs a most valuable function. Still,
the reader who is not acquainted with original authorities does not
really know history and is at the mercy of whatever myth or tradition
may be handed to him in print.

We should remember that today, even in England, original authorities are
quite easy to get at. Two little books, for instance, occur to me out of
hundreds: Mr. Rait's book on Mary Stuart and Mr. Archer's on the Third
Crusade. In each of these the reader gets in a cheap form, in modern and
readable English, the kind of evidence upon which historians base their
history, and he can use that evidence in the light of his own knowledge
of human nature and his own judgment of human life.

Or again, if he wants to know what the Romans really knew or said they
knew about the German tribes who, as pirates, so greatly influenced the
history of England, let him get Mr. Rouse's edition of Grenewey's
translation of the Germania in Blackie's series of English texts; it
will only cost sixpence, and for that money he will get a bit of
Caesar's Gallic War and the Agricola as well. But the list nowadays is a
very long one, luckily, and the lay reader has only to choose what
period he would like to read up, and he will find for nearly every one
first-hand evidence ready, cheap and published in a readable modern
form. That he should take such first-hand evidence is the very best
advice that any honest historian can give.

The Victory

The study of history, like the exploration, the thorough exploration, of
any other field, leads one to perpetual novelties, miracles, and
unexpected things; and I, in the study of the revolutionary wars, came
across the story of a battle which completely possessed my spirit.

It would not be to my purpose here to give its name. It is not among the
most famous; it is not Waterloo, nor Leipsic, nor Austerlitz, nor even
Jemappes. The more I read into the night the more I perceived that upon
the issue of that struggle depended the fate of the modern world. So
completely did the notes of Carnot and a few private letters that had
been put before me absorb my attention that I will swear the bugle-calls
of those two days (for it was a two-days' struggle) sounded more clearly
in my ears than the rumble of the London streets, and, as this died out
with the advance of the night and the approach of morning, I was living
entirely upon that ridge in Flanders, watching, as a man watches an
arena, whether the new things or the old should be victorious. It was
the new that conquered.

From that evening I was determined to visit this place of which so far I
had but read, and to see how far it might agree with the vision I had
had of it, and to people actual fields with the ghosts of dead soldiers.
And for the better appreciation of the drama I chose the season and the
days on which the fight had been driven across that rolling land, and I
came there, as the Republicans had come, a little before the dawn.

The hillside was silent and deserted, more even than are commonly such
places, though silence and desertion seem the common atmosphere of all
the fields on which such fates have been decided. A man looking over
Carthage Bay, especially a man looking at those sodden pools that were
the sound harbours of Carthage, might be in an uninhabited world; and
the loop of the Trebbia is the same, and the edge of Fontenoy; and even
here in England that hillside looking south up which the Normans charged
at Battle is a quiet and a drowsy sort of place.... So it was here in
Flanders.

For two miles as I ascended by the little sunken lane which the extreme
right wing had followed in the last attack I saw neither man nor beast,
but only the same stubble of the same autumn fields, and the same colder
sun shining upon the empty uplands until I reached the crest where the
Hungarian and the Croat had met the charge, and had disputed the little
village for two hours--a dispute upon which hung your fate and mine and
that of Europe.

It was a tiny little village, seven or eight houses together and no
more, with a crazy little wooden steeple to its church all twisted awry,
large barns, and comfortable hedgerows of the Northern kind; and from it
one looked out westwards over an infinity of country, following low
crest after low crest, down on to the French plains. I went into the inn
of the place to drink, and found the cobbler there complaining that
wealth disturbed the natural equality of men. Then I wandered out,
pacing this point and that which I knew accurately from my maps, and
thinking of the noise of the war. Behind the little church, upon a
ramshackle green not large enough to pitch the stumps for single-wicket,
was the modest monument, a cock in bronze, crowing, and the word
"Victory" stamped into the granite of the pedestal; the whole thing, I
suppose, not ten feet high. The bronze was very well done; it savoured
strongly of Paris and looked odd in this abandoned little place. But
every time my eyes sank from the bronze, to look at some other point in
the landscape to identify the emplacement of such and such a battery or
the gully that had concealed the advance of such and such a troop, my
glance perpetually returned to that word "VICTORY," sculptured by itself
upon the stone. It was indeed a victory; it was a victory which, for its
huge unexpectedness, for the noise of it, for the length of time during
which it was in doubt, for its final success, there is no parallel, and
yet it is by no means among the famous battles of the world. And though
the French count it one among the thousand of their battles, I doubt
whether even in Paris most men would recognize it for the hammer-blow it
was. The men of the time hardly knew it, though Carnot guessed at it, and
now to-day in Sorbonne I think that regal fight is taking its true place.

So I went down the eight miles of front northward along the ridge; for
even that battle, a hundred and more years ago, had an extended front of
this kind. I recognized the tall majestic fringe of beeches from which
had issued the last of the Royalist regiments bearing for the last time
upon a European field the white flag of the Bourbon Monarchy; I came
beyond it to the combe fringed with its semicircle of underbrush in
which Coburg had massed his guns in the last effort to break the French
centre when his flank was turned. I came to the main highway, very
broad, straight, and paved, which cuts this battlefield in two, and then
beyond it to the central position whose capture had made the final
manoeuvre possible.

All Wednesday the Grenadiers, German, tall, padded, smart, and stout,
had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that they
were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls, shoeless,
some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain and glory.
And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this battle, like so
many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men against boys; how grey
and veteran and trained in arms were the Austrians and the Prussians,
their allies, how strict in orders, how calm: and what children the
Terror had called up by force from the exhausted fields of remote French
provinces, to break them here against the frontier, like water against a
wall...!

There was a little chap, twelve years old, a drummer; he had crept and
crawled by hedgerows till he found himself behind the line of those
volleying Grenadiers. There, "before his side," and breaking all rules,
he had sounded the roll of the charge. They cut him down and killed him,
and the roll of his drum ceased hard. A generation or more later,
digging for foundations at this spot, the builders of the Peace came
upon his bones, the little bones of a child heaped pell-mell with
skeletons of the fallen giants round him.

I went back into the town in whose defence the battle had been waged,
and there I saw again in bronze this little lad, head high and mouth
open, a-beating of his drum, and again the word "VICTORY."

All that effort was undertaken, all those young men and children killed,
for something that was to happen for the salvation of the world; it has
not come. All that iron resistance of the German line had been forged
and organized till it almost conquered, till it almost thwarted, the
Republic, and it also had been organized for the defence, and, as some
thought, for the salvation, of the world. Some great good was to have
come by the storming of that hill, or some great good by the defeat of
the impetuous charge. Well, the hill was stormed, and (if you will) at
Leipsic the effort which had stormed it was rolled back. What has
happened to the High Goddess whom that youth followed, and worshipped as
they say, and what to the Gods whom their enemies defended? The ridge is
exactly the same.

Reality

A couple of generations ago there was a sort of man going mournfully
about who complained of the spread of education. He had an ill-ease in
his mind. He feared that book learning would bring us no good, and he
was called a fool for his pains. Not undeservedly--for his thoughts were
muddled, and if his heart was good it was far better than his head. He
argued badly or he merely affirmed, but he had strong allies (Ruskin was
one of them), and, like every man who is sincere, there was something in
what he said; like every type which is numerous, there was a human
feeling behind him: and he was very numerous.

Now that he is pretty well extinct we are beginning to understand what
he meant and what there was to be said for him. The greatest of the
French Revolutionists was right--"After bread, the most crying need of
the populace is knowledge." But what knowledge?

The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from books
and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions (that is,
impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or, what is
always almost as good and sometimes better, the interpreting voice of
the living man. For you must allow me the paradox that in some
mysterious way the voice and gesture of a living witness always convey
something of the real impression he has had, and sometimes convey more
than we should have received ourselves from our own sight and hearing of
the thing related.

Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to
primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any
reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they stand
not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to
convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing
the work which education was meant to do. When we receive them merely as
an enlargement of what we know and make of the unseen things of which we
read, things in the image of the seen, then they quite distort our
appreciation of the world.

Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and knows,
or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such and such
nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River Seine, Rome
upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi, Toledo upon the
River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one river, the river
near his home. And he will think of all those other rivers in its image.
He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the Seine and the
Mississippi--and they will all be the river near his home. Then let him
travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is from these
islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense of novelty
and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more majestic, seen
from the enormous forest heights above its lower course, than what,
perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it will be a
river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut banks and
with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down. But let him
see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling mud, pouring
solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river after long
drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the Tiber, on
foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression of nothing
but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil in its bed.
Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its long course and
the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river
at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will seem a chance flood. He
will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted
backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow
patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which
again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for
one hundred yards after another, the limits of the vast stream. At last,
if he has a boat with him, he may make some place where he has a clear
view right across to low trees, tiny from their distance, similarly half
swamped upon a further shore, and behind them a low escarpment of bare
earth. That is the Mississippi nine times out of ten, and to an
Englishman who had expected to find from his early reading or his maps a
larger Thames it seems for all the world like a stretch of East Anglian
flood, save that it is so much more desolate.

The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do they
tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the more
populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture of
security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the
geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men
that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the
Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the
hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which
here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as
well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,
which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the
influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,
and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.

So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too
much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of
the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know
nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim
certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by
this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon
our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a
fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The
greatest of Armadas may set out and not return.

There is one experience of travel and of the physical realities of the
world which has been so widely repeated, and which men have so
constantly verified, that I could mention it as a last example of my
thesis without fear of misunderstanding. I mean the quality of a great
mountain.

To one that has never seen a mountain it may seem a full and a fine
piece of knowledge to be acquainted with its height in feet exactly, its
situation; nay, many would think themselves learned if they know no more
than its conventional name. But the thing itself! The curious sense of
its isolation from the common world, of its being the habitation of awe,
perhaps the brooding-place of a god!

I had seen many mountains, I had travelled in many places, and I had
read many particular details in the books--and so well noted them upon
the maps that I could have re-drawn the maps--concerning the Cerdagne.
None the less the sight of that wall of the Cerdagne, when first it
struck me, coming down the pass from Tourcarol, was as novel as though
all my life had been spent upon empty plains. By the map it was 9000
feet. It might have been 90,000! The wonderment as to what lay beyond,
the sense that it was a limit to known things, its savage intangibility,
its sheer silence! Nothing but the eye seeing could give one all those
things.

The old complain that the young will not take advice. But the wisest
will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot
take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young,
and the reality can come only with years. The wise complain of the jingo
in every country; and properly, for he upsets the plans of statesmen,
miscalculates the value of national forces, and may, if he is powerful
enough, destroy the true spirit of armies. But the wise would be wiser
still if, while they blamed the extravagance of this sort of man, they
would recognize that it came from that half-knowledge of mere names and
lists which excludes reality. It is maps and newspapers that turn an
honest fool into a jingo.

It is so again with distance, and it is so with time. Men will not grasp
distance unless they have traversed it, or unless it be represented to
them vividly by the comparison of great landscapes. Men will not grasp
historical time unless the historian shall be at the pains to give them
what historians so rarely give, the measure of a period in terms of a
human life. It is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that
a contempt for the past arises, and that the fatal illusion of some
gradual process of betterment of "progress" vulgarizes the minds of men
and wastes their effort. It is from secondary impressions divorced from
reality that a society imagines itself diseased when it is healthy, or
healthy when it is diseased. And it is from secondary impressions
divorced from reality that springs the amazing power of the little
second-rate public man in those modern machines that think themselves
democracies. This last is a power which, luckily, cannot be greatly
abused, for the men upon whom it is thrust are not capable even of abuse
upon a great scale. It is none the less marvellous in its falsehood.

Now you will say at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power
for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system of
primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy can
you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best and the
greatest remedy is a true philosophy, which shall lead men always to ask
themselves what they really know and in what order of certitude they
know it; where authority actually resides and where it is usurped. But,
apart from the advent, or rather the recapture, of a true philosophy by
a European society, two forces are at work which will always bring
reality back, though less swiftly and less whole. The first is the poet,
and the second is Time.

Sooner or later Time brings the empty phrase and the false conclusion up
against what is; the empty imaginary looks reality in the face and the
truth at once conquers. In war a nation learns whether it is strong or
no, and how it is strong and how weak; it learns it as well in defeat as
in victory. In the long processes of human lives, in the succession of
generations, the real necessities and nature of a human society destroy
any false formula upon which it was attempted to conduct it. Time must
always ultimately teach.

The poet, in some way it is difficult to understand (unless we admit
that he is a seer), is also very powerful as the ally of such an
influence. He brings out the inner part of things and presents them to
men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how
the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect
no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets
themselves.

On the Decline of the Book: [And Especially of the Historical Book]

It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old
position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation,
but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the
habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization,
the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will
be subject, must increase.

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