First and Last

H >> H. Belloc >> First and Last

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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 appetite 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;
Sussex, 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
passing into Normandy from Picardy, brick-built, horse-breeding, and
slow, passing 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.
Pass 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 mass, 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
passed, 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 associate 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 space 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 mass 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 impassable as marsh, or with difficulty
passable 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 certitude), "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
grass 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 accumulation 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 superstition 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.

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