Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this countryside. The greatest was the anarchy of the sixteenth century; but it is probable that, coincidently with every grave lesion in the continuity of our civilisation, the Fens suffered, for they always needed the perpetual attention of man to keep them (as they so long were, and may be again if ever our people get back their land and restore a communal life) fully inhabited, afforested, and cultured.

It is probable that the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them. John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called "Morton's Leam." I say, every defeat of our civilisation was inflicted here in the Fens, but it is certain that the principal disaster followed the suppression of the monasteries.

These great foundations—nourishing hundreds and governing thousands, based upon the populace, drawn from the populace, and living by the common life—were scattered throughout the Fens. They were founded on the "islands" nearest the good land: Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely—the nuns of Chatteris.

They dated from the very beginning. Ely was founded within sight of our conversion, 672. Croyland came even before that, before civilisation and religion were truly re-established in Britain; Penda's great-nephew gave it its charter; St Augustine had been dead for little more than a century when the charter was signed. Even as the monks came to claim their land they discovered hermits long settled there. Thorney—Ancarig it was then—was even fifty years older than Croyland. The roots of all these go back to the beginning of the nation.

Ramsay and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells, establishing villages. Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know not how much more was their land.

When the monasteries were destroyed their lordship fell into the hands of that high class—now old, then new—the Cromwells and Russells and the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country. The intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was forgotten. The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture. Within a generation the whole land was drowned.

The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new landlords. These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their accumulations. Their power rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.

In every inch of England you can find the history of England. You find it very typically here. The growth of that leisured class which we still enjoy—the class that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities, acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land—the growth of that leisured class is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.

Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England. Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.

When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its generations of human effort were drowned, there was raised up for the restoration of this land the family of Russell.

The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these little squires. They were in possession when, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1600, was passed the General Draining Act. It was a generous and a broad Act: it was to apply not only to the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the realm. It was soon bent to apply to the family.

Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of Cornelius Vermuyden was sent for, that the work might be begun. For fifty years this man dug and intrigued. He was called in to be the engineer; he had the temerity to compete with the new landlords; he boasted a desire—less legitimate in an alien than in a courtier—to make a great fortune rapidly. He was ruined.

All the adventurers who first attempted the draining of the Fens were ruined—but not that permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford, surnamed "the Incomparable."

The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, but every Englishman now living on another man's land should study it. Vermuyden was to drain the Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his pains. These acres were in the occupation—for the matter of that, in great part the ownership—of a number of English families. It is true the land had lain derelict for seventy years, bereft of capital since the Reformation, and swamped. It is true that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor. It is true, therefore, that they could not properly comprehend a policy that was designed for the general advantage of the country. They only understood that the hunting and fishing by which they lived were to stop; that their land was to be very considerably improved and taken from them. In their ignorance of ultimate political good they began to show some considerable impatience.

The cry of the multitude has a way of taking on the forms of stupidity. The multitude in this case cried out against Vermuyden. They objected to a foreigner being given so much freehold. "In an anguish of despair"—to use one chronicler's words—they threw themselves under the protection of a leader. "That leader was, of course, Francis, Earl of Bedford, surnamed 'the Incomparable.' He could not hear unmoved the cry of his fellow-citizens. He yielded to their petition, took means to oust the Dutchmen, and immediately obtained for himself the grant of the 95,000 acres, by a royal order of 13 January, 1630/1, known as 'the Lynn Law.'"

When he saw the extent of the land and of the water upon it, even his tenacious spirit was alarmed. He therefore associated with himself in the expenses thirteen others, all persons of rank and fortune, as was fitting: alone of the fourteen he preserved his fortune.

The fourteen, then, began the digging of nine drains (if we include the repair of Morton's Leam); the largest was that fine twenty-one miles called the old Bedford River, and Charles I, though all in favour of so great a work, was all in dread of the power it might give to the class which—as his prophetic conscience told him—was destined to be his ruin.

There was a contract that the work should be finished in six years: when the six years were ended it was very far from finished. The King grumbled; but Francis, Earl of Bedford, belonged to a clique already half as powerful as the Crown. He threatened, and a new royal order gave him an extension of time. It was the second of his many victories.

The King refused to forget his defeat, and Francis, Earl of Bedford, began to show that hatred of absolute government which has made of his kind the leaders of a happy England. The King did a Stuart thing—he lost his temper. He said, "You may keep your 95,000 acres, but I shall tax them"; and he did. Francis, Earl of Bedford, felt in him a growing passion for just government. He already spoke of freedom; but he had no leisure wherein to enjoy it, for within two years he departed this life, of the smallpox, leaving to his son William the legacy of the great battle for liberty and for the public land.

This change in the Bedford dynasty coincided with the Civil Wars. William Russell, having led some of the Parliamentary forces at Edge Hill, was so uncertain which side might ultimately be victorious as to open secret negotiations with the King. Nothing happened to him, nor even to his brother, who intrigued later against Cromwell's life. He was at liberty to return once more and to survey from the walls of the old abbey the drowned land upon which he had set his heart.

The work of digging could not be carried on during the turmoil of the time; William, Earl of Bedford, filled his leisure in the framing of an elaborate bill of costs. It was dated 20 May, 1646, and showed the sums which he had spent and which had been wasted in the failure to reclaim the Fens. He stated them at over L90,000, and to this he added, like a good business man, interest at the rate of 8 per cent, for so many years as to amount to more than another L30,000.

As against the King, the trick was a good one; but, like many another financier, William, Earl of Bedford, was shortsighted. The more anxious the King grew to pay out public money to the Russells, the less able he grew to do so, till at last he lost not only the shadow of power over the treasury, but life itself; and William, Earl of Bedford, brought in his bill to the Commonwealth.

Cromwell was of the same class, and knew the trick too well. He gave the family leave to prosecute their digging to forget their demand for money. The Act was passed at noon. Bedford was sent for at seven o'clock the next morning and ordered to attend upon Cromwell, "and make thankful acknowledgments." He did so.

The works began once more. The common people, in their simplicity, rose as they had so often risen before, against a benefit they could not comprehend; but they no longer had a Stuart to deal with. To their extreme surprise they were put down "with the aid of the military." Then, for all the world as in the promotion of a modern company, the consulting engineer of the original promotors reappears. The Russells had patched it up with Vermuyden, and the work was resumed a third time.

There was, however, this difficulty, that though Englishmen might properly be constrained at this moment to love an orderly and godly life, and to relinquish their property when it was to the public good that they should do so, yet it would have been abhorrent to the whole spirit of the Commonwealth to enslave them even for a work of national advantage. A labour difficulty arose, and the works were in grave peril.

Those whose petty envy may be pleased at the entanglement of William, Earl of Bedford, have forgotten the destiny which maintains our great families. In the worst of the crisis the battle of Dunbar was fought; 166 Scotch prisoners (and later 500 more) were indentured out to dig the ditches, and it was printed and posted in the end of 1651 that it was "death without mercy" for any to attempt to escape.

The respite was not for long. Heaven, as though to try the patience of its chosen agent, raised up a new obstacle before the great patriot. Peace was made, and the Scotch prisoners were sent home. It was but the passing frown which makes the succeeding smiles of the Deity more gracious. At that very moment Blake was defeating the Dutch upon the seas, and these excellent prisoners, laborious, and (by an accident which clearly shows the finger of Divine providence) especially acquainted with the digging of ditches, arrived in considerable numbers, chained, and were handed over to the Premier House. At the same time it was ordered by the Lord Protector that when the 95,000 acres should at last be dry, any Protestant, even though he were a foreigner, might buy. Two years later an unfortunate peace compelled the return of the Dutch prisoners; but the work was done, and the Earl of Bedford returned thanks in his cathedral.

Restored to the leisure which is necessary for political action, the Russells actively intrigued for the return of the Stuarts, and pointed out (when Charles II was well upon his throne) how necessary it was for the Fens that their old, if irregular, privileges should be confirmed. It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the King—Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the Stuart dynasty was ended, the peasants had been taught their place, Vermuyden was out of the way, the ditches were all dug, the land acquired.

All the world knows the great part played by the House in the emancipation of England from the yoke of James II. The martyrdom of Lord William may have cast upon the Family a passing cloud; but whatever compensation the perishable things of this world can afford, they received and accepted. In 1694, having assisted at the destruction of yet another form of government, the Earl of Bedford was made Duke, and on 7 September, 1700, his great work now entirely accomplished, he departed this life peacefully in his eighty-seventh year. It was once more in their cathedral that the funeral service was preached by a Dr. Freeman, chaplain of no less than the King himself. I have read the sermon in its entirety. It closes with the fine phrase that William the fifth Earl and the first Duke of Bedford had sought throughout the whole of a laborious and patriotic life a crown not corruptible but incorruptible.

It was precisely a century since the Family had set out in its quest for that hundred square miles of land. Through four reigns, a bloody civil war, three revolutions and innumerable treasons, it had maintained its purpose, and at last it reached its goal.

"Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem."



THE ELECTION

The other day as I was going out upon my travels, I came upon a plain so broad that it greatly wearied me. This plain was grown in parts with barley, but as it stood high in foreign mountains and was arid, very little was grown. Small runnels, long run dry under the heat, made the place look like a desert—almost like Africa; nor was there anything to relieve my gaze except a huddle of small grey houses far away; but when I reached them I found, to my inexpressible joy, a railway running by and a station to receive me.

For those who complain of railways talk folly, and prove themselves either rich or, more probably, the hangers-on of the rich. A railway is an excellent thing; it takes one quickly through the world for next to nothing, and if in many countries the people it takes are brutes, and disfigure all they visit, that is not the fault of the railway, but of the Government and religion of these people, which, between them, have ruined the citizens of the State.

So was it not in this place of which I speak, for all the people were industrious, wealthy, kind, amenable, and free.

I took a ticket for the only town on the railway list whose history I knew, and then in a third-class carriage made entirely of wood I settled down to a conversation with my kind; for though these people were not of my blood—indeed, I am certain that for some hundreds of years not a drop of their blood has mingled with my own—yet we understood each other by a common tongue called Lingua Franca, of which I have spoken in another place and am a past master.

As all the people round began their talk of cattle, land, and weather, two men next me, or rather the one next me and the other opposite me, began to talk of the election which had been held in that delightful plain: by which, as I learnt, a dealer in herds had been defeated by a somewhat usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney. In this election more than half the voters—that is, a good third of the families in the plain—had gone up to the little huts of wood and had made a mark upon a bit of paper, some on one part, some on the other. About a sixth of the families had desired the dealer in herds to make their laws, and about a sixth the attorney. Of the rest some could not, some would not, go and make the little mark of which I speak. Many more could by law make it, and would have made it, if they had thought it useful to any possible purpose under the sun. One-sixth, I say, had made their mark for the aged and money-lending attorney, and one-sixth for the venerable but avaricious dealer in herds, and since the first sixth was imperceptibly larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the merchant, who stood to make the laws for the people. But not only to make laws: he was also in some mystic way the Persona and Representative of all the plain. The long sun-lit fields; the infinite past—Carolingian, enormous; the delicate fronds of young trees; the distant sight of the mountains, which is the note of all that land; the invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might yet achieve; its soul and its material self, were all summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, on God or no God in the schools. For the people of the plain were self-governing; they had no lords.

Of my two companions, the one had voted for the cow-buyer, but the other for the scribbler upon parchment, and they discussed their action without heat, gently and with many reasons.

The one said: "It cannot be doubted that the solidarity of society demands that the homogeneity of economic interests should be recognised by the magistrate." The other said: "The first need is rather that the historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary depositaries of the executive."

For these two men were of some education, and saw things from a higher standpoint than the peasants around us, who continued to discourse, now angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and rapidly, upon the insignificant matter of their lives: that is, strong, red, bubbling wine, healthy and well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage of daughters, and the putting forward of sons.

Then one of the two, who had long guessed by my dress and face from what country I came, said to me: "And you, how is it in your country?" I told him we met from time to time, upon occasions not less often than seven years apart, and did just as they had done. That one-sixth of us voted one way and one-sixth the other; the first, let us say, for a moneylender, and the second for a man remarkable for motor-cars or famous for the wealth of his mother; and whichever sixth was imperceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of Cumberland, or for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.

"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is Ourselves—he is our past and our great national memory. By his vote he decides what shall be done; but he is controlled."

"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.

"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.

At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"

"And by what are yours?" said I.

At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away with his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome terror of the people."

"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little awkwardly, "is different from ours."

After this, we were silent all three. We remembered, all three of us, the times when no such things were done in Europe, and yet men hung well together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more instinctive and ready. We remembered also—for it was in our common faith—the gross, permanent, and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. There arose perhaps in their minds a sight of the man they had sent to be the spirit and spokesman, or rather the very self, of that golden plateau which the train was crawling through, and certainly in my mind there rose the picture of a man—small, false, and vile—who was, by some fiction, the voice of a certain valley in my own land.

Then I said to them as I left the train at the town I spoke of: "Days, knights!"—for so one addresses strangers in that country. And they answered: "Your grace, we commend you to God."



ARLES

The use and the pleasure of travel are closely mingled, because the use of it is fulfilment, and in fulfilling oneself a great pleasure is enjoyed. Every man bears within him not only his own direct experience, but all the past of his blood: the things his own race has done are part of himself, and in him also is what his race will do when he is dead. This is why men will always read records, and why, even when letters are at their lowest, records still remain. Thus, if a diary be known to be true, then it seems vivid and becomes famous where if it were fiction no one would find any merit in it. History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new dimension. It is an aggregate of universal experience, nor, other things being equal, is any man's judgment so thin and weak as the judgment of a man who knows nothing of the past. But history, if it is to be kept just and true and not to become a set of airy scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time, must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things.

If the West of Europe be one place and one people separate from all the rest of the world, then that unity is of the last importance to us; and that it is so, the wider our learning the more certain we are. All our religion and custom and mode of thought are European. A European State is only a State because it is a State of Europe; and the demarcations between the ever-shifting States of Europe are only dotted lines, but between the Christian and the non-Christian the boundary is hard and full.

Now, a man who recognises this truth will ask, "Where could I find a model of the past of that Europe? In what place could I find the best single collection of all the forms which European energy has created, and of all the outward symbols in which its soul has been made manifest? To such a man the answer should be given, 'You will find these things better in the town of Arles than in any other place.'" A man asking such a question would mean to travel. He ought to travel to Arles.

Long before men could write, this hill (which was the first dry land at the head of the Rhone delta, beyond the early mud-flats which the river was pushing out into the sea) was inhabited by our ancestors. Their barbaric huts were grouped round the shelving shore; their axes and their spindles remain.

When thousands of years later the Greeks pushed northward from Massilia, Arles was the first great corner in their road and the first halting-place after the useless deserts that separated their port from the highway of the Rhone valley.

At the close of Antiquity Rome came to Arles in the beginning of her expansion, and the strong memories of Rome which Arles still holds are famous. Every traveller has heard of the vast unbroken amphitheatre and the ruined temple in a market square that is still called the Forum; they are famous—but when you see them it seems to you that they should be more famous still. They have something about them so familiar and yet so unexpected that the centuries in which they were built come actively before you.

* * * * *

The city of Arles is small and packed. A man may spend an hour in it instead of a day or a year, but in that hour he can receive full communion with antiquity. For as you walk along the tortuous lane between high houses, passing on either hand as you go the ornaments of every age, you turn some dirty little corner or other and come suddenly upon the titanic arches of Rome. There are the huge stones which appal you with the Roman weight and perpetuate in their arrangement an order that has modelled the world. They lie exact and mighty; they are unmoved, clamped with metal, a little worn, enduring. They are none the less a domestic and native part of the living town in which they stand. You pass from the garden of a house that was built in your grandfather's time, and you see familiarly before you in the street a pedestal and a column. They are two thousand years old. You read a placard idly upon the wall; the placard interests you; it deals with the politics of the place or with the army, but the wall might be meaningless. You look more closely, and you see that that wall was raised in a fashion that has been forgotten since the Antonines, and these realities still press upon you, revealed and lost again with every few steps you walk within the limited circuit of the town.

Rome slowly fell asleep. The sculpture lost its power; something barbaric returned. You may see that decline in capitals and masks still embedded in buildings of the fifth century. The sleep grew deeper. There came five hundred years of which so little is left in Europe that Paris has but one doubtful tower and London nothing. Arles still preserves its relics. When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still defend it. It is unlit. It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the main street of the city, blind and enormous. It is the very time it comes from.

When all that fear and anarchy of the mind had passed, and when it was discovered that the West still lived, a dawn broke. The medieval civilisation began to sprout vigorously through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an old tree sprouts before March is out. The memorials of that transition are common enough. We have them here in England in great quantity; we call them the "Norman" architecture. A peculiarly vivid relic of that springtime remains at Arles. It is the door of what was then the cathedral—the door of St. Trophimus. It perpetuates the beginning of the civilisation of the Middle Ages. And of that civilisation an accident which has all the force of a particular design has preserved here, attached to this same church, another complete type. The cloisters of this same Church of St. Trophimus are not only the Middle Ages caught and made eternal, they are also a progression of that great experiment from its youth to its sharp close.

You come into these cloisters from a little side street and a neglected yard, which give you no hint of what you are going to see. You find yourself cut off at once and put separately by. Silence inhabits the place; you see nothing but the sky beyond the border of the low roofs. One old man there, who cannot read or write and is all but blind, will talk to you of the Rhone. Then as you go round the arches, "withershins" against the sun (in which way lucky progression has always been made in sacred places), there pass you one after the other the epochs of the Middle Ages. For each group of arches come later than the last in the order of sculpture, and the sculptors during those 300 years went withershins as should you.

You have first the solemn purpose of the early work. This takes on neatness of detail, then fineness; a great maturity dignifies all the northern side. Upon the western you already see that spell beneath which the Middle Ages died. The mystery of the fifteenth century; none of its wickedness but all its final vitality is there. You see in fifty details the last attempt of our race to grasp and permanently to retain the beautiful.

When the circuit is completed the series ends abruptly—as the medieval story itself ended.

There is no way of writing or of telling history which could be so true as these visions are. Arles, at a corner of the great main road of the Empire, never so strong as to destroy nor so insignificant as to cease from building, catching the earliest Roman march into the north, the Christian advance, the full experience of the invasions; retaining in a vague legend the memory of St. Paul; drawing in, after the long trouble, the new life that followed the Crusades, can show such visions better, I think, than Rome herself can show them.



THE GRIFFIN

A specialist told me once in Ealing that no inn could compare with the Griffin, a Fenland inn. "It is painted green" he said, "and stands in the town of March. If you would enjoy the Griffin, you must ask your way to that town, and as you go ask also for the Griffin, for many who may not have heard of March will certainly have heard of the Griffin."

So I set out at once for the Fens and came at the very beginning of them to a great ditch, which barred all further progress. I wandered up and down the banks for an hour thinking of the inn, when I met a man who was sadder and more silent even than the vast level and lonely land in which he lived. I asked him how I should cross the great dyke. He shook his head, and said he did not know. I asked him if he had heard of the Griffin, but he said no. I broke away from him and went for miles along the bank eastward, seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in the distance, and up against the horizon a distant spire, which I thought might be the Spire of March. For March and the Griffin were not twenty miles away. And still the great ditch stood between me and my pilgrimage.

* * * * *

These dykes of the Fens are accursed things: they are the separation of friends and lovers. Here is a man whose crony would come and sit by his fireside at evening and drink with him, a custom perhaps of twenty years' standing, when there comes another man from another part armed with public power, and digs between them a trench too wide to leap and too soft to ford. The Fens are full of such tragedies.

One may march up and down the banks all day without finding a boat, and as for bridges there are none, except, indeed, the bridges which the railway makes; for the railways have grown to be as powerful as the landlords or the brewers, and can go across this country where they choose. And here the Fens are typical, for it may be said that these three monopolies—the landlords, the railways, and the brewers—govern England.

* * * * *

But at last, at a place called Oxlode, I found a boat, and the news that just beyond lay another dyke. I asked where that could be crossed, but the ferryman of Oxlode did not know. He pointed two houses out, however, standing close together out of the plain, and said they were called "Purles' Bridge," and that I would do well to try there. But when I reached them I found that the water was between me and them and, what is more, that there was no bridge there and never had been one since the beginning of time. Of these jests the Fens are full.

In half an hour a man came out of one of the houses and ferried me across in silence. I asked him also if he had heard of the Griffin. He laughed and shook his head as the first one had done, but he showed me a little way off the village of Monea, saying that the people of that place knew every house for a day's walk around. So I trudged to Monea, which is a village on one of the old dry islands of the marsh; but no one at Monea knew. There was, none the less, one old man who told me he had heard the name, and his advice to me was to go to the cross roads and past them towards March, and then to ask again. So I went outwards to the cross roads, and from the cross roads outward again it seemed without end, a similar land repeating itself for ever. There was the same silence, the same completely even soil, the same deep little trenches, the same rare distant and regular rows of trees.

* * * * *

Since it was useless to continue thus for you—one yard was as good as twenty miles—and since you could know nothing more of these silences, even if I were to give you every inch of the road, I will pass at once to the moment in which I saw a baker's cart catching me up at great speed. The man inside had an expression of irritable poverty. I did not promise him money, but gave it him. Then he took me aboard and rattled on, with me by his side.

I had by this time a suspicion that the Griffin was a claustral thing and a mystery not to be blurted out. I knew that all the secrets of Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn words, and that the simplest of things will not be told one if one asks too precipitately; so I began to lay siege to his mind by the method of dialogue. The words were these:—

MYSELF: This land wanted draining, didn't it?

THE OTHER MAN: Ah!

MYSELF: It seems to be pretty well drained now.

THE OTHER MAN: Ugh!

MYSELF: I mean it seems dry enough.

THE OTHER MAN: It was drownded only last winter.

MYSELF: It looks to be good land.

THE OTHER MAN: It's lousy land; it's worth nowt.

MYSELF: Still, there are dark bits—black, you may say—and thereabouts it will be good.

THE OTHER MAN: That's where you're wrong; the lighter it is the better it is ... ah! that's where many of 'em go wrong. (Short silence.)

MYSELF: (cheerfully): A sort of loam?

THE OTHER MAN (calvinistically): Ugh!—sand!... (shaking his head). It blaws away with a blast of wind. (A longer silence.)

MYSELF (as though full of interest): Then you set your drills to sow deep about here?

THE OTHER MAN (with a gesture of fatigue): Shoal. (Here he sighed deeply.)

After this we ceased to speak to each other for several miles. Then:

MYSELF: Who owns the land about here?

THE OTHER MAN: Some owns parts and some others.

MYSELF (angrily pointing to an enormous field with a little new house in the middle): Who owns that?

THE OTHER MAN (startled by my tone): A Frenchman. He grows onions.

Now if you know little of England and of the temper of the English (I mean of 0.999 of the English people and not of the 0.001 with which you associate), if, I say, you know little or nothing of your fellow-countrymen, you may imagine that all this conversation was wasted. "It was not to the point," you say. "You got no nearer the Griffin." You are wrong. Such conversation is like the kneading of dough or the mixing of mortar; it mollifies and makes ready; it is three-quarters of the work; for if you will let your fellow-citizen curse you and grunt at you, and if you will but talk to him on matters which he knows far better than you, then you have him ready at the end.

So had I this man, for I asked him point-blank at the end of all this: "What about the Griffin?" He looked at me for a moment almost with intelligence, and told me that he would hand me over in the next village to a man who was going through March. So he did, and the horse of this second man was even faster than that of the baker. The horses of the Fens are like no horses in the world for speed.

* * * * *

This horse was twenty-three years old, yet it went as fast as though all that tomfoolery men talk about progress were true, and as though things got better by the process of time. It went so fast that one might imagine it at forty-six winning many races, and at eighty standing beyond all comparison or competition; and because it went so fast I went hammering right through the town of March before I had time to learn its name or to know whither I was driving; it whirled me past the houses and out into the country beyond; only when I had pulled up two miles beyond did I know what I had done and did I realise that I had missed for ever one of those pleasures which, fleeting as they are, are all that is to be discovered in human life. It went so fast, that before I knew what had happened the Griffin had flashed by me and was gone.

* * * * *

Yet I will affirm with the tongue of faith that it is the noblest house of call in the Fens.

* * * * *

It is better to believe than to handle or to see. I will affirm with the tongue of faith that the Griffin is, as it were, the captain and chief of these plains, and has just managed to touch perfection in all the qualities that an inn should achieve. I am speaking not of what I know by the doubtful light of physical experience, but of what I have seen with the inward eye and felt by something that transcends gross taste and touch.

Low rooms of my repose! Beams of comfort and great age; drowsy and inhabiting fires; ingle-nooks made for companionship. You also, beer much better, much more soft, than the beer of lesser towns; beans, bacon, and chicken cooked to the very limit of excellence; port drawn from barrels which the simple Portuguese had sent to Lynn over the cloud-shadowed sea, and honourable Lynn without admixture had sent upon a cart to you, port undefined, port homogeneous, entirely made of wine: you also beds! Wooden beds with curtains around them, feathers for sleeping on, and every decent thing which the accursed would attempt to destroy; candles (I trust)—and trust is more perfect than proof—bread made (if it be possible) out of English wheat; milk drawn most certainly from English cows, and butter worthy of the pastures of England all around. Oh, glory to the Fens, Griffin, it shall not be said that I have not enjoyed you!

* * * * *

There is a modern habit, I know, of gloom, and men without faith upon every side recount the things that they have not enjoyed. For my part I will yield to no such habit. I will consider that I have more perfectly tasted in the mind that which may have been denied to my mere body, and I will produce for myself and others a greater pleasure than any pleasure of the sense. I will do what the poets and the prophets have always done, and satisfy myself with vision, and (who knows?) perhaps by this the Griffin of the Idea has been made a better thing (if that were possible!) than the Griffin as it is—as it materially stands in this evil and uncertain world.

So let the old horse go by and snatch me from this chance of joy: he has not taken everything in his flight, and there remains something in spite of time, which eats us all up.

And yet ... what is that in me which makes me regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what have you not refused me!



THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH

I very well remember the spring breaking ten years ago in Lorraine. I remember it better far than I shall ever remember another spring, because one of those petty summits of emotion that seem in boyhood like the peaks of the world was before me. We were going off to camp.

Since every man that fires guns or drives them in France—that is, some hundred thousand and more at any one time, and taking in reserves, half a million—must go to camp in his time, and that more than once, it seems monstrous that a boy should make so much of it; but then to a boy six months is a little lifetime, and for six months I had passed through that great annealing fire of drill which stamps and moulds the French people to-day, putting too much knowledge and bitterness into their eyes, but a great determination into their gestures and a trained tenacity into the methods of their thought.

To me also this fire seemed fiercer and more transforming because, until the day when they had marched me up to barracks in the dark and the rain with a batch of recruits, I had known nothing but the easy illusions and the comfort of an English village, and had had but journeys or short visits to teach me that enduring mystery of Europe, the French temper: whose aims and reticence, whose hidden enthusiasms, great range of effort, divisions, defeats, and resurrections must now remain the principal problem before my mind; for the few who have seen this sight know that the French mind is the pivot on which Europe turns.

I had come into the regiment faulty in my grammar and doubtful in accent, ignorant especially of those things which in every civilisation are taken for granted but never explained in full; I was ignorant, therefore, of the key which alone can open that civilisation to a stranger. Things irksome or a heavy burden to the young men of my age, born and brought up in the French air, were to me, brought up with Englishmen an Englishman, odious and bewildering. Orders that I but half comprehended; simple phrases that seemed charged with menace; boasting (a habit of which I knew little), coupled with a fierce and, as it were, expected courage that seemed ill suited to boasting—and certainly unknown outside this army; enormous powers of endurance in men whose stature my English training had taught me to despise; a habit of fighting with the fists, coupled with a curious contempt for the accident of individual superiority—all these things amazed me and put me into a topsy-turvy world where I was weeks in finding my feet.

But strangest of all, and (as I now especially believe) most pregnant with meaning for the future, was to find the inherited experience in me of so much teaching and careful habit—instinct of command, if you will—all that goes to make what we call in Western Europe a "gentleman," put at the orders and the occasional insult of a hierarchy of office, many of whose functionaries were peasants and artisans. Stripes on the arm, symbols, suddenly became of overwhelming value; what I had been made with so much care in an English public school was here thought nothing but a hindrance and an absurdity. This had seemed to me first a miracle, then a grievous injustice, then most unpractical, and at last, like one that sees the answer to a riddle, I saw (when I had long lost my manners and ceased to care for refinements) that the French were attempting, a generation before any others in the world, to establish an army that should be a mere army, and in which a living man counted only as one numbered man.

Whether that experiment will hold or not I cannot tell; it shocks the refinement of the whole West of Europe; it seems monstrous to the aristocratic organisation of Germany; it jars in France also with the traditions of that decent elder class of whom so many still remain to guide the Republic, and in whose social philosophy the segregation of a "directing class" has been hitherto a dogma. But soon I cared little whether that experiment was to succeed or no in its final effort, or whether the French were to perfect a democracy where wealth has one vast experience of its own artificiality, or to fail. The intellectual interest of such an experiment, when once I seized it, drove out every other feeling.

I became like a man who has thoroughly awaked from a long sleep and finds that in sleep he has been taken overseas. I merged into the great system whose wheels and grindings had at first astonished or disgusted me, and I found that they had made of me what they meant to make. I cared more for guns than for books; I now obeyed by instinct not men, but symbols of authority. No comfortable fallacy remained; it no longer seemed strange that my captain was a man promoted from the ranks; that one of my lieutenants was an Alsatian charity boy and the other a rich fellow mixed up with sugar-broking; that the sergeant of my piece should be a poor young noble, the wheeler of No. 5 a wealthy and very vulgar chemist's son, the man in the next bed ("my ancient," as they say in that service) a cook of some skill, and my bombardier a mild young farmer. I thought only in terms of the artillery: I could judge men from their aptitude alone, and in me, I suppose, were accomplished many things—one of Danton's dreams, one of St. Just's prophecies, the fulfilment also of what a hundred brains had silently determined twenty years before when the staff gave up their swords outside Metz; the army and the kind of army of which Chanzy had said in the first breath of the armistice, "A man who forgets it should be hanged, but a man who speaks of it before its time should be shot with the honours of his rank."

All this had happened to me in especial in that melting-pot up in the eastern hills, and to thirty thousand others that year in their separate crucibles.

In the process things had passed which would seem to you incredible if I wrote them all down. I cared little in what vessel I ate, or whether I had to tear meat with my fingers. I could march in reserve more than twenty miles a day for day upon day. I knew all about my horses; I could sweep, wash, make a bed, clean kit, cook a little, tidy a stable, turn to entrenching for emplacement, take a place at lifting a gun or changing a wheel. I took change with a gunner, and could point well. And all this was not learnt save under a grinding pressure of authority and harshness, without which in one's whole life I suppose one would never properly have learnt a half of these things—at least, not to do them so readily, or in such unison, or on so definite a plan. But (what will seem astonishing to our critics and verbalists), with all this there increased the power, or perhaps it was but the desire, to express the greatest thoughts—newer and keener things. I began to understand De Vigny when he wrote, "If a man despairs of becoming a poet, let him carry his pack and march in the ranks."

Thus the great hills that border the Moselle, the distant frontier, the vast plain which is (they say) to be a battlefield, and which lay five hundred feet sheer below me, the far guns when they were practising at Metz, the awful strength of columns on the march moved me. The sky also grew more wonderful, and I noticed living things. The Middle Ages, of which till then I had had but troubling visions, rose up and took flesh in the old town, on the rare winter evenings when I had purchased the leisure to leave quarters by some excessive toil. A man could feel France going by.

It was at the end of these six months, when there was no more darkness at roll-call, and when the bitter cold (that had frozen us all winter) was half forgotten, that the spring brought me this excellent news, earlier than I had dared to expect it—the news that sounds to a recruit half as good as active service. We were going to march and go off right away westward over half a dozen horizons, till we could see the real thing at Chalons, and with this news the world seemed recreated.

Seven times that winter we had been mobilised: four times in the dead of the night; once at midday, once at evening, and once at dawn. Seven times we had started down the wide Metz road, hoping in some vague way that they would do something with us and give us at least some manoeuvres, and seven times we had marched back to barracks to undo all that serious packing and to return to routine.

Once, for a week in February, the French and German Governments, or, more probably, two minor permanent officials, took it into their silly heads that there was some danger of war. We packed our campaign saddles every night and put them on the pegs behind the stalls; we had the emergency rations served out, and for two days in the middle of that time we had slept ready. But nothing came of it. Now at least we were off to play a little at the game whose theory we had learnt so wearily.

And the way I first knew it would easily fill a book if it were told as it should be, with every detail and its meaning unrolled and with every joy described: as it is, I must put it in ten lines. Garnon (a sergeant), three others, and I were sent out (one patrol out of fifty) to go round and see the reserve horses on the farms. That was delight enough, to have a vigorous windy morning with the clouds large and white and in a clear sky, and to mix with the first grain of the year, "out of the loose-box."

We took the round they gave us along the base of the high hills, we got our papers signed at the different stables, we noted the hoofs of the horses and their numbers; a good woman at a large farm gave us food of eggs and onions, and at noon we turned to get back to quarters for the grooming. Everything then was very well—to have ridden out alone without the second horse and with no horrible great pole to crush one's leg, and be free—though we missed it—of the clank of the guns. We felt like gentlemen at ease, and were speaking grandly to each other, when I heard Garnon say to the senior of us a word that made things seem better still, for he pointed out to a long blue line beyond Domremy and overhanging the house of Joan of Arc, saying that the town lay there. "What town?" said I to my Ancient; and my Ancient, instead of answering simply, took five minutes to explain to me how a recruit could not know that the round of the reserve horses came next before camp, and that this town away on the western ridge was the first halting-place upon the road. Then my mind filled with distances, and I was overjoyed, saving for this one thing, that I had but two francs and a few coppers left, and that I was not in reach of more.

When we had ridden in, saluted, and reported at the guard, we saw the guns drawn up in line at the end of the yard, and we went into grooming and ate and slept, hardly waiting for the morning and the long regimental call before the reveille; the notes that always mean the high road for an army, and that are as old as Fontenoy.

* * * * *

That next morning they woke us all before dawn—long before dawn. The sky was still keen, and there was not even a promise of morning in the air, nor the least faintness in the eastern stars. They twinkled right on the edges of the world over the far woods of Lorraine, beyond the hollow wherein lay the town; it was even cold like winter as we harnessed; and I remember the night air catching me in the face as I staggered from the harness-room, with my campaign saddle and the traces and the girths and the saddle cloth, and all the great weight that I had to put upon my horses.

We stood in the long stables all together, very hurriedly saddling and bridling and knotting up the traces behind. A few lanterns gave us an imperfect light. We hurried because it was a pride to be the first battery, and in the French service, rightly or wrongly, everything in the artillery is made for speed, and to speed everything is sacrificed. So we made ready in the stable and brought our horses out in order before the guns in the open square of quarters. The high plateau on which the barracks stood was touched with a last late frost, and the horses coming out of the warm stables bore the change ill, lifting their heads and stamping. A man could not leave the leaders for a moment, and, while the chains were hooked on, even my middle horses were restive and had to be held. My hands stiffened at the reins, and I tried to soothe both my beasts, as the lantern went up and down wherever the work was being done. They quieted when the light was taken round behind by the tumbrils, where two men were tying on the great sack of oats exactly as though we were going on campaign.

These two horses of mine were called Pacte and Basilique. Basilique was saddled; a slow beast, full of strength and sympathy, but stupid and given to sudden fears. Pacte was the led horse, and had never heard guns. It was prophesied that when first I should have to hold him in camp when we were practising he would break everything near him, and either kill me or get me cells. But I did not believe these prophecies, having found my Ancient and all third-year men too often to be liars, fond of frightening the younger recruits. Meanwhile Pacte stood in the sharp night, impatient, and shook his harness. Everything had been quickly ordered.

We filed out of quarters, passed the lamp of the guard, and saw huddled there the dozen or so that were left behind while we were off to better things. Then a drawn-out cry at the head of the column was caught up all along its length, and we trotted; the metal of shoes and wheel-rims rang upon the road, and I felt as a man feels on a ship when it leaves harbour for great discoveries.

We had climbed the steep bank above St. Martin, and were on the highest ridge of land dominating the plain, when the sky first felt the approach of the sun. Our backs were to the east, but the horizon before us caught a reflection of the dawn; the woods lost their mystery, and one found oneself marching in a partly cultivated open space with a forest all around. The road ran straight for miles like an arrow, and stretched swarmingly along it was the interminable line of guns. But with the full daylight, and after the sun had risen in a mist, they deployed us out of column into a wide front on a great heath in the forest, and we halted. There we brewed coffee, not by batteries, but gun by gun.

Warmed by this little meal, mere coffee without sugar or milk, but with a hunk left over from yesterday's bread and drawn stale from one's haversack (the armies of the Republic and of Napoleon often fought all day upon such sustenance, and even now, as you will see, the French do not really eat till a march is over—and this may be a great advantage in warfare)—warmed, I say, by this little meal, and very much refreshed by the sun and the increasing merriment of morning, we heard the first trumpet-call and then the shouted order to mount.

We did not form one column again. We went off at intervals, by batteries; and the reason of this was soon clear, for on getting to a place where four roads met, some took one and some took another, the object being to split up the unwieldy train of thirty-six guns, with all their waggons and forges, into a number of smaller groups, marching by ways more or less parallel towards the same goal; and my battery was left separate, and went at last along a lane that ran through pasture land in a valley.

The villages were already awake, and the mist was all but lifted from the meadows when we heard men singing in chorus in front of us some way off. These were the gunners that had left long before us and had gone on forward afoot. For in the French artillery it is a maxim (for all I know, common to all others—if other artilleries are wise) that you should weight your limber (and therefore your horses) with useful things alone; and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried, save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is desired. I do, indeed, remember one case when it was thought necessary to send a group of batteries during the manoeuvres right over from the left to the right of a very long position which our division was occupying on the crest of the Argonne. There was the greatest need for haste, and we packed the gunners on to the limber (there were no seats on the gun in the old type—there are now) and galloped all the way down the road, and put the guns in action with the horses still panting and exhausted by that extra weight carried at such a speed and for such a distance. But on the march, I say again, we send the gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but as you shall hear when we come to Commercy, a reserve of drivers also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have reached it.

So here in this silent and delightful valley, through which ran a river, which may have been the Meuse or may have been a tributary only, we caught up our gunners. Their song ceased, they were lined up along the road, and not till we were passed were they given a little halt and repose. But when we had gone past with a huge clattering and dust, the bombardier of my piece, who was a very kindly man, a young farmer, and who happened to be riding abreast of my horses, pointed them out to me behind us at a turning in the road. They were taking that five minutes' rest which the French have borrowed from the Germans, and which comes at the end of every hour on the march. They had thrown down their knapsacks and were lying flat taking their ease, I could not long look backwards, but a very little time after, when we had already gained nearly half a mile upon them, we again heard the noise of their singing, and knew that they had reshouldered their heavy packs. And this pack is the same in every unmounted branch of the service, and is the heaviest thing, I believe, that has been carried by infantry since the Romans.

It was not yet noon, and extremely hot for the time of year and for the coldness of the preceding night, when they halted us at a place where the road bent round in a curve and went down a little hollow. There we dismounted and cleaned things up a little before getting into the town, where we were to find what the French call an etape; that is, the town at which one halts at the end of one's march, and the word is also used for the length of a march itself. It is not in general orders to clean up in this way before coming in, and there were some commanders who were never more pleased than when they could bring their battery into town covered with dust and the horses steaming and the men haggard, for this they thought to be evidence of a workmanlike spirit. But our colonel had given very contrary orders, to the annoyance of our captain, a man risen from the ranks who loved the guns and hated finery.

Then we went at a walk, the two trumpets of the battery sounding the call which is known among French gunners as "the eighty hunters," because the words to it are, "quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, chasseurs," which words, by their metallic noise and monotony, exactly express the long call that announces the approach of guns. We went right through the town, the name of which is Commercy, and the boys looked at us with pride, not knowing how hateful they would find the service when once they were in for its grind and hopelessness. But then, for that matter, I did not know myself with what great pleasure I should look back upon it ten years after. Moreover, nobody knows beforehand whether he will like a thing or not; and there is the end of it.

We formed a park in the principal place of the town; there were appointed two sentinels to do duty until the arrival of the gunners who should relieve them and mount a proper guard, and then we were marched off to be shown our various quarters. For before a French regiment arrives at a town others have ridden forward and have marked in chalk upon the doors how many men and how many horses are to be quartered here or there, and my quarters were in a great barn with a very high roof; but my Ancient, upon whom I depended for advice, was quartered in a house, and I was therefore lonely.

We groomed our horses, ate our great midday meal, and were free for a couple of hours to wander about the place. It is a garrison, and, at that time, it was full of cavalry, with whom we fraternised; but the experiment was a trifle dangerous, for there is always a risk of a quarrel when regiments meet as there is with two dogs, or two of any other kind of lively things.

Then came the evening, and very early, before it was dark, I was asleep in my clothes in some straw, very warm; but I was so lazy that I had not even taken off my belt or sword. And that was the end of the first day's marching.



THE SEA-WALL OF THE WASH

The town of Wisbeach is very like the town of Boston. It stands upon a river which is very narrow and which curves, and in which there rises and falls a most considerable tide, and which is bounded by slimy wooden sides. Here, as at Boston, the boats cannot turn round; if they come in frontways they have to go out backwards, like Mevagissey bees: an awkward harbour.

As I sat there in the White Hart, waiting for steak and onions, I read in a book descriptive of the place that a whale had come to Wisbeach once, and I considered that a whale coming up to Wisbeach on a tide would certainly stay there; not indeed for the delights of the town (of which I say nothing), but because there would be no room to turn round; and a whale cannot swim backwards. The only fish that can swim backwards is an eel. This I have proved by observation, and I challenge any fisherman to deny it.

So much for Wisbeach, which stands upon the River Nene or Nen, which is the last of the towns defended by the old sea-wall—which is the third of the Fen ports—the other two being Boston and Lynn, which is served by two lines of railway and which has two stations.

Very early next morning, and by one of these stations, another man and I took train to a bridge called Sutton Bridge, where one can cross the River Nen, and where (according to the map) one can see both the sea-walls, the old and the new. It was my plan to walk along the shore of the Wash right across the flats to Lynn, and so at last perhaps comprehend the nature of this curious land.

* * * * *

When I got to Sutton Bridge I discovered it to be a monstrous thing of iron standing poised upon a huge pivot in mid-stream. It bore the railway and the road together. It was that kind of triumphant engineering which once you saw only in England, but which now you will see all over the world. It was designed to swing open on its central pivot to let boats go up the River Nen, and then to come back exactly to its place with a clang; but when we got to it we found it neither one thing nor the other. It was twisted just so much that the two parts of the roads (the road on the bridge and the road on land) did not join.

Was a boat about to pass? No. Why was it open thus? A man was cleaning it. The bridge is not as big as the Tower Bridge, but it is very big, and the man was cleaning it with a little rag. He was cleaning the under part, the mechanisms and contraptions that can only be got at when the bridge is thus ajar. He cleaned without haste and without exertion, and as I watched him I considered the mightiness of the works of Man contrasted with His Puny Frame. I also asked him when I should pass, but he answered nothing.

As we thus waited men gathered upon either side—men of all characters and kinds, men holding bicycles, men in carts, afoot, on horseback, vigorous men and feeble, old men, women also and little children, and youths witless of life, and innocent young girls; they gathered and increased, they became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out their hands in a desire for the further shore: but the river ran between.

Then, as being next the gate, I again called out: When might we pass? A Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when the bridge was shut again. I said: When would that be? He said: Could I not see that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, contrasting the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.

Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself, and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the Ouse.

* * * * *

Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?

Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.

* * * * *

Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea so inconspicuously.

The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in battle—violent and heroic. The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy sea. This coast of Eastern England is like the death of one of these eastern merchants here—lethargic, ill-contented, drugged with ease. The dry land slips, and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, confused with a yellow thickness and brackish with the weight of inland water behind.

I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea. You have, I say, the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which the ships can go; and on the other side you have, inhabited, an ancient land. There should be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or limit. There is nothing. You cannot say where one begins and the other ends. One does not understand the Fens until one has seen that shore.

The sand and the mud commingle. The mud takes on little tufts of salt grass barely growing under the harsh wind. The marsh is cut and wasted into little islands covered at every high tide, except, perhaps, the extreme of the neaps. Down on that level, out from the dyke to the uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at random on a woman's work-table by the wind.

There are miles and miles of it right up to the EMBANKMENT, the great and old SEA-WALL, which protects the houses of men. You have but to eliminate that embankment to imagine what the whole countryside must have been like before it was raised, and the meaning of the Fens becomes clear to you. The Fens were long ago but the continuation inland of this sea-morass. The tide channels of the marsh were all of one kind, though they differed so much in size. Some of these channels were small without name; some a little larger, and these had a local name; others were a little larger again, and worthy to be called rivers—the Ouse, the Nen, the Welland, the Glen, the Witham. But, large or small, they were nothing, all of them, but the scouring of tide-channels in the light and sodden slime. It was the high tide that drowned all this land, the low tide that drained it; and wherever a patch could be found just above the influence of the tide or near enough to some main channel for the rush and swirl of the water to drain the island, there the villages grew. Wherever such a patch could be found men built their first homes. Sometimes, before men civic, came the holy hermits. But man, religious, or greedy, or just wandering, crept in after each inundation and began to tame the water and spread out even here his slow, interminable conquest. So Wisbeach, so March, so Boston grew, and so—the oldest of them all—the Isle of Ely.

The nature of the country (a nature at which I had but guessed whenever before this I had wandered through it, and which I had puzzled at as I viewed its mere history) was quite clear, now that I stood upon the wall that fenced it in from the salt water. It was easy to see not only what judgments had been mistaken, but also in what way they had erred. One could see why and how the homelessness of the place had been exaggerated. One could see how the level was just above (not, as in Holland, below) the mean of the tides. One could discover the manner in which communication from the open sea was possible. The deeps lead out through the sand; they are but continuations under water of that tide-scouring which is the note of all the place inland, and out, far out, we could see the continuation of the river-beds, and at their mouths far into the sea, the sails.

A man sounding as he went before the north-east wind was led by force into the main channels. He was "shepherded" into Lynn River or Wisbeach River or Boston River, according as he found the water shoaler to one side or other of his boat. So must have come the first Saxon pirates from the mainland: so (hundreds of years later) came here our portion of that swarm of Pagans, which all but destroyed Europe; so centuries before either of them, in a time of which there is no record, the ignorant seafaring men from the east and the north must have come right up into our island, as the sea itself creeps right up into the land through these curious crevices and draughts in the Fenland wall.

Men—at least the men of our race—have made everything for themselves; and they will never cease. They continue to extend and possess. It is not only the architecture; it is the very landscape of Europe which has been made by Europeans. In what way did we begin to form this difficult place, which is neither earth nor water, and in which we might have despaired? It was conquered by human artifice, of course, somewhat as Frisia and the Netherlands, and, as we may believe, the great bay of the Cotentin were conquered; but it has certain special characters of its own, and these again are due to the value in this place of the tides, and to the absence of those natural dykes of sand which were, a thousand years ago, the beginnings of Holland.

* * * * *

Two methods, working side by side, have from the beginning of human habitation reclaimed the Fens. The first has been the canalisation, the fencing in of the tideways; the second has been the banking out of the general sea. The spring tides covered much of this land, and when they retired left it drowned. Against their universal advancing sheet of water a bank could be made. Such a bank cut off the invasion of the hundreds of runnels, small and great, by which the more ordinary tides that could not cover the surface had yet crept into the soil and soaked it through.

When such a bank had been built, gates, as it were, permitted the water to spend its force and also to use its ebb and flow for the draining of the land beyond. The gates which let the tide pour up and down the main ways became the new mouths of the main rivers; inland the courses of the rivers (which now took all the sea and thus became prodigious) were carefully guarded. Even before trenches were dug to drain the fields around, earth was thrown up on either side of the rivers to confine them each to one permanent channel; nor did the level of the rivers rise, or their beds gets clogged; the strength of the tide sufficed for the deepening of their channels. Into the rivers so fortified the other waterways of the Fens were conducted.

By these methods alone much of the land was rendered habitable and subject to the plough. Probably these methods were enough to make it all it was in the Middle Ages. It was only far later, almost in our own time, that water was gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the rivers and pumped out artificially with mills; nor is it quite certain even now that this method (borrowed from Holland) is the best; for the land, as I have said, is above and not below the sea.

Of these words, whose tradition is immemorial, the greatest, of course, are the sea-walls.

Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great bank which limited and protected the land against the sea is also older than any history.

It is called Roman, and relics of Rome have been found in it, but it has not the characteristic of Roman work. It runs upon no regular lines; its contour is curved and variable. It is surely far older than the Roman occupation. Earth, heaped and beaten hard, is the most enduring of things; the tumuli all over England have outlasted even the monoliths, and the great defensive mounds at Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and clearer cut than anything that the Middle Ages have left. This bank, which first made Fenland, still stands most conspicuous. You may follow it from the Nene above Sutton Bridge right over to Lynn River, and again northward from Sutton Bridge (or rather, from the ferry above it) right round outside Long Sutton and Holbeach, and by Forsdyke Bridge and outside Swyneshead; everywhere it encloses and protects the old parishes, and everywhere seaward of it the names of the fields mark the newest of endeavours.

* * * * *

We returned from a long wandering upon the desolate edges of the sea to the bank which we proposed to follow right round to the mouth of the Ouse: a bank that runs not straight, but in great broken lines, as in old-fashioned fortification, and from which far off upon the right one sees the famous churches of the Wringland, far off upon the left a hint beyond the marshes and the sands of the very distant open sea.

A gale had risen with the morning, and while it invigorated the travellers in these wastes it seemed to increase their loneliness, for it broke upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the eye from the monotonous sad land to the charge and change of the torn sky above, but in a sense also it impelled us, as though we were sailing before it as it swept along the edge of the bank and helped us to forget the interminable hours.

The birds for whom this estuary is a kind of sanctuary and a place of secure food in all weathers, the birds swept out in great flocks over the flats towards the sea. They were the only companionship afforded to us upon this long day, and they had, or I fancied they had, in their demeanour a kind of contempt for the rare human beings they might see, as though knowing how little man could do upon those sands. They fed all together upon the edge of the water, upon the edge of the falling tide, very far off, making long bands of white that mixed with the tiny breaking wavelets. Now and then they rose in bodies, and so rising disappeared; but as they would turn and wheel against the wind, seeking some other ground, they sent from moment to moment flashes of delicate and rare light from the great multitude of their wings. I know of nothing to which one may compare these glimpses of evanescent shining but these two things—the flash of a sword edge and the rapid turning in human hands of a diaphanous veil held in the light. It shone or glinted for a moment, then they would all wheel together and it disappeared.

So, watching them as a kind of marvel, we saw distant across the sea a faint blue tower, and recognised it for Boston Stump, so many, many miles away.

But for the birds and this landmark, which never left us, all the length of the dyke was empty of any sight save the mixing of the sea and the land. Then gradually the heights in Norfolk beyond grew clearer, a further shore narrowed the expanse of waters, and we came to the river mouth of the Ouse, and caught sight, up the stream, of the houses of a town.



THE CERDAGNE

There is a part of Europe of which for the moment most people have not heard, but which in a few years everybody will know; so it is well worth telling before it is changed what it is like to-day. It is called the Cerdagne. It is a very broad valley, stretching out between hills whose height is so incredible—or at least, whose appearance of height is so incredible—that when they are properly painted no one will believe them to be true. Indeed, I know a man who painted them just as they are, and those who saw the picture said it was fantastic and out of Nature, like Turner's drawings. But those who had been with him and had seen the place, said that somehow he had just missed the effect of height.

It is remarkable that in any country, even if one does not know that country well, what is unusual to the country strikes the traveller at once. And so it is with the Cerdagne. For all the valleys of the Pyrenees except this one are built upon the same plan. They are deep gorges, narrowing in two places to gates or profound corridors, one of these places being near the crest and one near the plain; and down these valleys fall violent torrents, and in them there is only room for tiny villages or very little towns, squeezed in between the sheer surfaces of the rock or the steep forests.

So it is with the Valley of Laruns, and with that of Meuleon, and with that of Luz, and with those of the two Bagneres, and with the Val d'Aran, and with the Val d'Esera, and with the very famous Valley of Andorra.

With valleys so made the mountains are indeed more awful than they might be in the Alps: but you never see them standing out and apart, and the mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not apprehended until you come to the cirque or hollow at the end of each valley just underneath the main ridge; by that time you have climbed so far that you have halved the height of the barrier.

But the Cerdagne, unlike all the other valleys, is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets and corn; so, standing upon either side and looking to the other, you see all together and in the large its mountain boundaries. It is like the sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, but very much more grand. Moreover, as no one has written sufficiently about it to prepare the traveller for what he is to see (and in attempting to do so here I am probably doing wrong, but a man must write down what he has seen), the Cerdagne breaks upon him quite unexpectedly, and his descent into that wealthy plain is the entry into a new world. He may have learnt the mountains by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and many crossings of the main chain by those precipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees more like a paling than a mountain crest, but though he should know them thoroughly all the way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the Cerdagne will only appear to him the more astonishing. It renews in any man however familiar he may be with great mountains, the impressions of that day when he first saw the distant summits and thought them to be clouds.

Apart from all this, the Cerdagne is full of a lively interest, because it preserves far better than any other Pyrenean valley those two Pyrenean things—the memory of European history and the intense local spirit of the Vals.

The memory of European history is to be seen in the odd tricks which the frontier plays. It was laid down by the commissioners of Mazarin two hundred and fifty years ago, and instead of following the watershed (which would leave the Cerdagne all Spanish politically as it is Catalan by language and position) it crosses the valley from one side to another, leaving the top end of it and the sources of its rivers under French control.

That endless debate as to whether race or government will most affect a people can here be tested, though hardly decided. The villages are Spanish, the hour of meals is Spanish, and the wine is Spanish wine. But the clocks keep time, and the streets are swept, and, oddest of all, the cooking is French cooking. The people are Spanish in that they are slow to serve you or to find you a mount or to show you the way, but they are French in that they are punctual in the hour at which they have promised to do these things; and they are Spanish in the shapes of their ricks and the nature of their implements, but French in the aspect of their fields. One might also discuss—it would be most profitable of all—where they are Spanish and where they are French in their observance of religion.

This freak which the frontier plays in cutting so united a countryside into two by an imaginary line is further emphasised by an island of Spanish territory which has been left stranded, as it were, in the midst of the valley. It is called Llivia, and is about as large as a large English country parish, with a small country town in the middle.

One comes across the fields from villages where the signs and villagers and the very look of the surface of the road are French; one suddenly notices Spanish soldiers, Spanish signs, and Spanish prices in the streets of the little place; one leaves it, and in five minutes one is in France again. It is connected with its own country by a neutral road, but it is an island of territory all the same, and the reason that it was so left isolated is very typical of the old regime, with its solemn legal pedantry, which we in England alone preserve in all Western Europe. For the treaty which marked the limits here ceded to the French "the valley and all its villages." The Spaniards pleaded that Llivia was not a village but a town, and their plea was admitted.

I began by saying that this wide basin of land, with its strong people and its isolated traditions, though it was so little known to-day, would soon be too well known. So it will be, and the reason is this, that the very low pass at one end of it will soon be crossed by a railway. It is the only low pass in the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere be above ground. Within perhaps five years it will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner is for the Alps, and when that is done any one who has read this may go and see for himself whether it is not true that from that plain at evening the frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest thing in the world.



CARCASSONNE

Carcassonne differs from other monumental towns in this: that it preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment, and from that moment has "set," and has suffered no further change. You see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally despaired of—and after which each group of the Western Empire began to see to its own preservation—down to that last achievement of the thirteenth, when medieval civilisation had reached its full flower and was ready for the decline that followed the death of St. Louis and the extinction of the German phantasy of empire.