 31. On the Fog. A young man in the uniform of a lieutenant of Dragoons is riding on the edge of a wood in a thick fog. The month is the month of November, and the year is the year 1793. The young man has a simple, open face, with rather protrubant blue eyes and sandy hair. His mouth is a half-smile, and he does not seem to mind having lost his way. His name is Boutrope. The more I see of warfare, the more I am astonished. It is true I have only seen four months of it. My father would be very much astonished if he could see me now. My mother would be more than astonished. She would be positively alarmed. On the other hand, using, it is a great relief to me, and would be a still greater relief to her, that I cannot hear the sound of firearms. The more I see of warfare, the more perplexed I become. Looking up at the edge of the wood on his left. Now what is that wood? Before the fog fell, I could have sworn we were in an open, rolling country with spinies here and there, and I could almost have told you very roughly where we were and where the enemy were. More or less, so to speak, and now here is a horrid, great wood, and where am I? At this moment, a single voice has heard through the fog. The single voice belongs to a man, called Metrus. He is as yet unseen. Metrus, get back a little. When I said follow me, I did not mean bunching up like a lot of dirty linemen. I meant keeping your spaces. Charles, you are as pigheaded as ever. There are times when one does not answer a superior, but there are other times when one does. Angrily, Charles, there is no reply. Something has gone very definitely wrong with my troop. That is the worst of fog. As he says this, he emerges in a vast and murky way into the vision of Butro. The two men stop their horses and look at each other through the mist. Butro, have you seen the thirty-second? Metrus. Butro perceives him to be a tall man, quite ten years to senior, very lean with menacing moustaches, and clothed in a uniform with which he is unfamiliar. No, sir, I have not seen the thirty-second. He salutes with a sword. I take it you are an officer in the Republican service? Butro wearily. Oh, yes. Metrus, with elaborate courtesy. Then, sir, you are my prisoner. My name is George D. Metrus of Hairene in this country, and my father's name will be familiar to you. Butro, your father's name is not familiar to me, sir, and what is more, my father's name would not be familiar to you. For my poor old dad, God bless him, is at the present moment in Bayon, where he is a grocer, in a large way of business, I am glad to say. And talking of prisoners, you are my prisoner. It is as well I should tell you this before we go further. For if there is one thing I detest more than another in this new profession of mine, it is the ambiguity thereof. He salutes with his sword in rather an extravagant fashion and smiles broadly. Metrus, making his horse trot up quite close to Butro, and halting stiffly while he lowers his sword. Sir, I should be loathed to quarrel with one so young and evidently so new to arms. Butro, and I, sir, lowering his sword as far as ever he can stretch, would be still more loathed to quarrel with one so greatly my senior and one evidently too used to this lethal gain. Metrus, biting his lips, I detest your principle, sir, but I respect your uniform. Butro, you have the advantage of me, sir. Your uniform seems to me positively grotesque, but your principles I admire enormously. Metrus stiffly, sir, I serve the emperor. You have heard my name? Butro, I have heard your name, and now that you tell me that you serve the emperor, I am willing to believe that also. So it seems that we are enemies. I thought as much when you first showed out of the fog. It was not your uniform which gave me this opinion. Metrus, then what is it? Butro, it was your singular habit of commanding men who were not there. Metrus in a boiling passion which he restrains. I did not come here, sir, for a contest of words. Butro, genuinely putting up his sword. I take it you did not come here with any direct motive. You got here somehow just as I did, and neither of us knows why. Metrus in extreme anger. But you will know why very soon, sir, and I hope I shall know why too. Sir, I call upon you to draw. Butro seating himself back in the saddle with great ease while his horse munches the wet grass. Now there you are. I have been a soldier only these few weeks, and I thought I had got hold of all the muddlement there was. Lines which aren't lines, and positions strongly held which anybody can walk around for fun, and communications cut when as effect one could go right along them on horseback, and destructive fire that hits nobody, and excellent morale when one's men are on the point of hitting one on the nose. But if you will allow me, sir, you positively take the prize in the matter. You suggest the duelo or some such fantasy. Do you want us to fight with these cavalry swords from the saddle? Metrus. I do not know if you're trying to gain time, sir. I suggest that you should meet me on foot here and now. Butro, what, and lose my horse? Metrus. Sir, we can tie the two beasts by their bridles, and we can hang their bridles so tied to the branch of one of these trees. Butro, frowning. I have a very short experience of warfare. I think I have said that before. And I hesitate to correct a man of your experience. But if you can really tie two bridles together, and then have enough leather left to get it over the branch of a tree, you'll teach me something about the art of campaigning of which I was quite innocent. Getting down from his horse. Come, I think, in the French service we have a better way than that. He unbuckles one end of the snaffle-rain. You see, looking up genially, we leave the curve on. If I had time, I would explain to you why. Now, sir, you will not unbuckle the end of your snaffle-rain? Metrus stiffly. No, sir, I will not. Butro sign. Not all the same. The service simply fossilizes them. Especially, it would seem, the enemy. Though I confess, turning courteously to Metrus and bowing to him, you are the first of the enemy I have ever met. Metrus restraining himself. Pray, sir, do not delay. Butro, full of good humor. I will not. See, I pass my snaffle-rain in through the buckle of your horse's curb. And pardon me, sir, but what a fine horse. Is it yours or the Emperor's? Metrus ominously. It is mine, sir. Butro, keep it. This jerking his thumb at his weedy mount belongs to the Republic. If it is still a Republic for news travels slowly to the armies, at any rate it doesn't belong to me. He slowly takes the end of the snaffle-rain and looks for something to fasten it to. He shakes his head doubtfully. At last, holding the end of the snaffle-rain in his left hand, while the two horses begin to browse peacefully, he draws his sword with his right, and putting himself in a theatrical posture says, Come on, sir, I am damned if I will let go of these horses. Metrus, solemnly. I do not jest upon these occasions. Butro, neither do I, sir. Indeed, I have not been in such an occasion before, and I make it a rule never to jest when I do anything for the first time. Come, draw, and put yourself in a position of defense, or by heaven, so far as these two animals will allow me, I will make a mincemeat of you with my sword. Metrus, boiling over. This is far more than any gentleman can endure. He stands before Butro, with his left hand clenched behind his back, his right foot well advanced, and his saber in tears. Now, sir. Butro, very simply. Now, nothing happens. Metrus, sir, are you upon your guard? Butro, more or less, jerking the horses, gar up. Do Metrus, excuse me, sir, it seems that even in browsing grass, this horse of mine has a devil of a hard mouth. He nearly sprained my wrist. Well then, are you upon your guard? Metrus, courteously. I am. Butro is in surprise. Oh, you are? He gives a tremendous cut at the point of the neck, which his opponent skillfully parries and replies to by a thrust. Never. Rapidly parrying his sharp succession of thrusts that follow from his opponent, never thrust with a light cavalry sword. I don't know much about. Ah, you miss that. Much about this business, but he suddenly gets round inside Metrus' guard, but has the misfortune to cut a spent blow into nothing better than cloth. They disengage. Metrus, sir, you play well enough for a man who is uninstructed, but I warn you, you are depending upon luck. Butro, I know that. Luckily for me, my mind is divided, and I can form no plan. For these animals at the end of the snaffle rain have nearly pulled my arm off. However, let us have a second bout. The great thing for men like me is not to plan too much. Voices are heard through the fog. Sir, let me warn you, like a gentleman, though my father is but a grocer and yours for all I know, a rude dragon, that I hear the voice of one who is most indudably my colonel, and talking of his profession, he was at the outbreak of this regrettable campaign a butcher in Toulouse. He is a very brutal man, but I will not detain you for your time is short. Metrus, this is more than I will stand. They engage, and Metrus, whose blood is now up and whom he's business, gets butro with a slash on the cheek at the third pass. The colonel, now apparent through the thick fog with a group of misty fingers behind him. Do I interrupt you, gentlemen? Butro with great respect. My colonel, I had the misfortune to be separated from my troop during the fog, but I have taken this man, pointing at the Austrian with his sword, prisoner, but only after a sharp passage of arms during which my colonel I have been wounded. He points to the scratch on his cheek. Colonel, coldly. Lieutenant Butro, you shall have forty days. He turns to a soldier. Undo that scrimmage of bridles, the soldier obeys him. He turns to Metrus with great courtesy. I take it, sir, you are an officer in the forces of the emperor, and that you hold his commission? Metrus, undoubtedly. Colonel, then, sir, you will follow me, for I take it. You constitute yourself my prisoner. Turning to an officer upon his right. Major Clement, you will see to the enforcement of my sentence upon Lieutenant Butro. Pray add upon the record that he jessed with a superior officer when discovered separated from his command, fencing with a member of the enemy's forces. The brigadier may deal with the complaint as he chooses. Butro, upon my soul, the longer I follow it, the less I comprehend the career of arms. The end of section thirty-one. Section thirty-two, on anything. This is a Libra box recording. All Libra Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Anything by Hilaire Belog. Section thirty-two, on the Spaniard. When I was in the French army, I met many men who had a constant tradition of the military past. These were not in the regiment, but one came across them in the garrison town where we were quartered, and among others there was an old man whose father had fought in the peninsula and who retained a very vivid family memory of those wars. From this old man I gathered in particular what I had learned in general from reading an impression of the Spaniard as a soldier, but that impression was false. It was false for many reasons, but chiefly for this, that Spain, like the United Kingdom, is very highly differentiated indeed, and province differs from province to an extent hardly ever grasped by those who have never visited the country. When many years later I had the opportunity to visit Spain, this was the first point I noticed. It is particularly striking in the mountains. You will find yourself with one type of man talking Catalan in some small modern village, the way in which he chills his garden, the way in which his house is built, and the way in which he bargains with you, are all native to his race. You set off over the hills, and by evening you come to another village more different than is a Welsh village from an English one, for you have crossed from Catalonia into Aragon. Then again the boundary of the Basque provinces, or at least of the Basque race, is as clean as a cut with a knife. One may argue indefinitely whether this is because the Basques have preferred the peculiar climate and soil of their inheritance, or whether it is their energy and tenacity which have changed the earth. But there it is. The Basque is much more separate from the people around him, than is even, if he will pardon my saying so, the Irishmen of the West, from the Scotchmen of the Lothians. There is another form of differentiation in Spain, which is so striking, that I hesitate for adjectives to describe it, lest those adjectives should seem excessive. But I will say this, it is more striking than the contrast between the Oasis and the desert in Africa, and that is pretty strong. I mean the differentiation produced by the sudden change from the high plateau to the sea plains. The word sea plains is not strictly accurate. The belt running back from the Mediterranean sometimes looks like a plain, sometimes like an enclosed valley. More often it is a system of terraces, hills upon hills. But at any rate, when you are once out of the influence of the sea and onto the high plateau, which form as it were the body of the Spanish square, you pass from Algerians to sterility, from ease to hardship, and from the man who is always willing to smile to the stoic. Then again, you have the contrast between Andalusia and everything to the north of Andalusia. Andalusia was a very wealthy part of Spain under the Romans. It must always remain the very wealthy part of Spain so far as agriculture is concerned. It has easy communications, and a climate like nothing on earth. Therefore, when the Moors came, they found a large, active and instructed Christian population, and they ruined Andalusia less than any other part of Spain. Nay, in some odd and not very pleasant way, they married the Asiatic to the European, and the European solidity. The European power over stone, the European sense of a straight line, were in Andalusia used by the vague imagination of the Asiatic to his own purpose, with marvelous results. All this has produced a quite distinct type of man, and it is remarkable that, as is to be found in so many similar cases in Europe, the people exactly Lymitropheus to Andalusia on the north are peculiarly sparse, impoverished, and alone. There lies the wide and arid sweep of Lomonsha, imperishable in European letters. Now, having said so much as to this high differentiation of the Spanish people, and one could add much more, the estuary is always unconquered, the Atlantic tithes and rivers, the tideless eastern harbors, the curious poverty of Esther Mandura, the French experiments of Madrid and its neighborhood, so utterly ill-fitted to the climate and the genius of Spain. Let me say something of the Spanish unity. No nation in Europe is so united, by which I do not mean that no other nation is so homogeneous, even in those deep things which escape superficial differentiation. The Spaniard is united to the Spaniard by the three most powerful bonds that can bind man to man, religion, historical memory, and isolation. It is not to be admitted by any careful traveler that the religious emotion of the modern Spaniard is either combative or profound. Indeed, I know nothing more remarkable than the passage from Spanish to French thought in this respect. You leave, let us say, you ask it. You notice at the morning mass a moving and somewhat small concourse of worshipers, few communicants, but above all in the temper of the place, in the written stuff of the somewhat belated newspapers, the sort of indifference, as though the thing of the soul muddled through. You bicycle a long day to Canfrank, the next day you are over the hills and lord, what hills? And then you are in the seething vat of the great French quarrel. From the little villages right up to the majestic capital, Toulouse, you feel the pulsation increasing. Religion and its enemies are there at war. The thing is vital and men are quite ready to die on either side. Of this I say you find little or nothing in Spain. Nevertheless, religion does bind the Spaniard to the Spaniard and it binds him firmly to his kind. For the very fact that there is so little opposition, while it produces so much indifference, produces also a singular national contempt and every man speaking to every other man knows with precision how that man's mind stands upon the ultimate things, how careless he is and yet how secure. Again the Spaniards are united by that profound historical memory which is a necessity to all nations and a peculiar asset in those who retain it alive. We in this country feel the appetite for an historical memory. We attempt to satisfy that appetite by the creation of legends. We call ourselves Anglo-Saxons. There is even, I believe, a notable body which will have us descend from the ten lost tribes. The French satisfy that appetite by recurrent experiences, the reign of the Grand Monarch, the Revolution, 1870. Glorious or tragic, each national experience gives a new impetus to the historic memory of the French people. Not so the Spaniard. All Spain is bound together by the enormous recollection of the Reconquista. Here is a province in which the faith and the Roman order were not recovered by persuasion, as was the case with Britain, nor were utterly lost, as was the case with Africa for so long. But we're got back mile by mile as the price of hard fighting. That fighting was, so to speak, the very trade of the Spaniards, from the time when Charlemagne was a little boy, to the time when Henry VIII was a little boy. All the story of our European growth, the time when we were made, the time which is to the French the accomplishment of their unity, to the English the foundation of their institutions, to the Italians the development of their art, that to the Spaniard is the story of the Reconquista. And the Middle Ages, which have impressed themselves upon every European nation as the glorious transition of youth, impresses itself upon the sad memory of a man, stand for the Spaniard to Reconquista. This has nothing to do with his knowledge of names or with what is called education. It is in the blood. The best proof of its result is this, that the Englishman invariably says of the Spaniard that while other nations show differences of manner, changing from class to class, the Spaniard is always a gentleman. The word gentleman is a very meager word, but on the whole the man who uses it best means the tradition of the Middle Ages, and especially of the fighting man which the Middle Ages produced, and the Spaniard everywhere shows the external qualities of those men. For instance, you cannot insult him with impunity, and that characteristic, though we often write it down, is one which in other nations is somewhat rare. Take the modern for all and all, and outside Spain if you insult him he will usually argue. Finally, the Spaniards are bound together by their isolation. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, different as province is from province. You feel everywhere something quite separate from that which lies north of the Pyrenees, and from the Pyrenees on all over the west of Europe. Rhodes are an exception, has the rule, the hours of meals, the very habit in the wearing of the clothes, the form of salutation, the mule taking the place of the horse, the perceptible restraint in every kind of converse. All these mark out the harsh soil which lends a perpetual note of nobility to the story of Europe. No man who has known Spain, but would be able to say, if he were taken there blindfolded, and suddenly shown his surroundings, this is Spain. The frontier is sharp, the division clear, the isolation, absolute. The limits of these few pages forbid me a thousand things in this respect. I wish I could describe, for instance, how there is in every Spanish building, from the least to the greatest, something at once severe and strange. Bowling into that great harbor of Barcelona one sees the customs house, a building with wings, coming over the northern slopes of the Guatemala one sees Segovia, sailing out in some immortal way, as though the cathedral and palace intended to attempt the air. Spain lives and will revive by such imaginations. It should be added, by way of closing these few notes, that the Spanish man is not only silent, which is perhaps a fault in him, but square, and so healthy in his limbs and in his mind, that when he is rested and can speak again, something will be changed in Europe. The end of section 32. Section 33 On Anything This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Anything by Hilaer Bellach. Section 33 On the Fortress There is a province of Europe where a dead plane stretches out upon every side. It is not very extended if you judge by the map alone. It is perhaps but 25 or 30 miles from its center to either of its boundary ranges. But to the eye it seems infinite, for it lies under that gray weather of the north in which the imagination exaggerates distance, and so easily conceives imaginary flatness extending everywhere beyond the midst of the horizon. In the midst of this plane there rises, most abruptly, a little market town. It stands upon a conical hill some 300 feet in height, and the impression it gives of being a rock or an island is enhanced by the height of its buildings, which, as is the case with nearly all medieval work, are designed for a general effect, and are, whether consciously or unconsciously, as well planned and grouped as though one artist had sketched the whole and had left an inviolable design to posterity. In this little town I had business some years ago to stop for the night, and when the next morning I found that there were two hours between my breakfast and my train, I walked out on to the crest of the hill to see the view and to think about the past. It was autumn. The many artificially aligned trees which bordered the winding, deserted avenues, all round the edge of the height, were losing their leaves. The air was singularly clear, and the effect of the small but isolated height upon which one stood was very strong. I came into the north-eastern corner of the huge ramparts which still surround the little place, and there I found a most interesting man. He was upon the border between what are called nowadays middle age and old age, that is, he was an old man, and if he lived would soon be a very old man. He was a wrecked and spare, and was short, and he had all the bearing of a man who has been perpetually trained, and indeed I found out when I got to know him better, that he had seen service in Africa, and in Russia, and in Mexico, three very distant places. He had never, however, risen beyond the rank of colonel. He was a gunner, and exceedingly poor, and he was finishing his life alone in this little town. They gave him meals at the hotel for a sum agreed upon between them, where he lodged he did not choose to tell me, but I fancy in some very cheap and runeous little Rome under one of the big Flemish roofs of the place. His only pleasure was to take these walks about the town to read his newspaper, before it was twenty-four hours old, and to remember the trade in which he had been engaged. We sat together on the very edge of the rampart, and I asked him, since it was his business to know so much about these things, whether the place would ever, in his opinion, enter once again into the scheme of European war. He told me that this was absolutely certain. He said there was no field so small, nor no village so forgotten, but in its cycle was swept by one or other of those armies, which the people of Europe send out, one against the other, pursuing various ends. This little town in which we sat had never seen an enemy for over two hundred years, yet there beneath us was the enormous evidence of its past. The trench was like a street, fifty or sixty feet deep. As the house fronts of a street are, as wide at least as the narrow streets of any of these old towns, and on the further side of the enormous heap of earth, and beyond it the level descent of glaces. Here was a town not larger than some of our smaller English cathedral towns, Ely for instance, yet having rotted in such a mighty effort, and proof of military determination, as would today seem worthy of a great city. These fortifications ran all around the place. The only two gates in and out of it, through which ran the great road, which linked the stronghold with the capital, were flanked by such works as the great modern forts occasionally show, and upon every point of its circumference, one perceived the fixed will of a crushing government responsible for all the destinies of a nation, that this place should be inviolable. My companion said to me, Many men choose many things as their examples of the way in which nothing human can remain, and to most men the best example is the change of taste in art or letters. They point out how great buildings put up with infinite care by men who love them, will with all their souls seem tottery to an immediate posterity, and they wonder why verse which was supreme in their childhood is ridiculed in their old age. But to me the most formidable proof of our futility is to be found in works such as these. They succeeded each other all over Europe. Long before our written record began, you can have the Cyclopian Wars, what you can see in Tuscany and further east in the Mediterranean. You have the Roman entrenchments and the medieval castles, and the new system of a bane which the Italians created, and of which this earthquake before us is the finest work. And each in its turn bears on into the future the stamp of futility. Something changes in man. He makes a new weapon or he forgets the old. He develops a new method of attack or a different mood in connection with war. Nay, his very desires in the matter of victory change, for he will desire in one generation glory and in another profit, and in a third the mere occupation of a particular species of sacred land. And as these human things change in him, so the fortifications of his cities become like garments out of fashion and are useless for the purpose and are thrown aside. You might then say, said I, that those who fortify today are foolish, and for that matter you might add that those who have fortified in the past were foolish, for since each in turn has proved to be wrong with regard to the future, each generation might have spared itself this enormous labor. You are right when you call it enormous labor, said he, but you are wrong when you say that it was ever futile. What a labor it is, only those know, who have looked closely into and meditated upon the fortifications of the past. The chalk hills and ramparts thrown up upon them, by men perhaps who could use no spade and who depended for carriage upon baskets, which we today, when we estimate them in a modern method, reckon in fantastic sums of money. And this was done to defend, we know not what, by men every record of whom has perished. The ancient walls of the cities are much the largest, and the strongest buildings they can boast, and much the most enduring. The transformation of a city, two hundred years ago and more, went hardly a frontier place of Europe, but had its elaborate system of main and outworks proves the same labor. Consider little Bayonne, never other than a little town, and yet flanked with the work which must have meant more than the building of a modern railway. And then lastly consider today the great garrisons circled with forts, Spezia and Metz, and the French frontier garrisons, and Antwerp, and the line of the Muse, and even at the far ends of the world Port Arthur, which though it was never finished, was to have been among the greatest of all. Yes, it is a toil if you like, and that is why those who court defeat by boasting, shirk it or ridicule it. But they are right to ridicule it, said I, since time itself ridicules the walls of a city, and since it can be shown that no city has been made impregnable. You use a false argument, he insisted. It is as though you were to say that because all men die, therefore no man should live. These trenches, and these walls, and these circles of isolated forts today, procure from men who fight under their shoulder a draft upon time. That is what fortification is, and that is why all who have ever understood the Art of War have fortified, and all who upon the contrary have in one way or another failed to understand the Art of War, whether because they secretly desired to avoid arms, or whether because they believed themselves invincible, which is the most unmilitary mood in the world, have failed to fortify. I have heard it said, I answered him, in the schools where such things are taught, that the Romans, as they were the chief masters of war, were also the most plotting in the use of the spade, and that not only would they fortify permanently every military post, but that they cast up a square fieldwork round them every night, wherever the army rested. The little spare old gunner shrugged his shoulders. They would have found it awkward, he said, to do that in the case of a single battery quartered during maneuvers in a country house. But in general, you are right. The Romans, who were the great masters of the Art of War, thought of the spade, and the sword, as of twin brothers, only the sword was the more noble and in a fashion the elder of the two. At any rate, certainly, those who are in the tradition of the Romans perpetually fortify. Then he asked me abruptly, since you are a foreigner, and since you say that you have traveled, for I have told him all my travels when we made equations, have you not noticed that wherever men are boastful or inept, they despise fortifications, and that it is absent, and the bases of their military actions, their depots, their political centers, their harbors, and dockyards lie open. I cannot tell, I answered, for I have no knowledge of such things. Well, you find it so, he said, and he walked away. He was much ruder and more long winded than if he had been in the cavalry. But you cannot have everything at once. THE END OF SECTION 33 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. ON ANYTHING by Hilaer Bellach SECTION 34 ON THE HUNTER One day I had occasion to travel at the expense of a fund more or less public, and certainly collective, in a railway train of which the carriages were wagon's deluxe. It was by its description a train for the very rich. Yet few of that numerous class were traveling in it, for it was going, in the depth of winter, from one of the most desolate highlands of Europe to another of Europe's most offensive deserts. I had business with one and the other. There was in the dining-car this luxurious train a gentleman who said opposite me. He was dressed as are so many of his class in boots and striped trousers, and a black coat and waistcoat. He had on a quiet tie of grey silk and what is called upon the continent an English collar. He was nearly bald, but his eyes were determined and his mustaches were of the shapes and seemed to be of the size of buffalo horns. They were of a metallic color and looked like steel. It is the custom on the continent of Europe for males when they meet to accost each other, even if they have not been introduced, as indeed is the custom, if you will observe it narrowly, of the mass of the population at home. There is indeed a story of a man who stood upon the bridge at Lyons, wringing his hands and shouting out as he gazed upon the arrow we roam, which was bearing down very rapidly a drowning human head. Will no one introduce me to that gentleman that I may save him? For I am an excellent swimmer. But this story would not apply to the mass of males upon the continent. We therefore were ready to accost each other. He spoke to me in a curious language which I believed to be Hungarian, for though I do not know Basque, I should have recognized the Basque termination, and Finnish would not be used in the west of Europe, and save for Basque, Hungarian and Finnish, all other tongues have something in common. The Teutonic dialects, though they are infinite, can at once be distinguished, and a Russian does not address you in his own tongue in a foreign country. When therefore this stranger man had spoken to me in this tongue which I believed to be Hungarian, I replied to him gently in the Limosin dialect, as being the most southern with which I had any acquaintance, and upon the principle that with foreigners the more southern you are the better chance you have. He answered in pure Italian, which is of no use to me. I spoke to him then in the French of Paris, which he understood ill, but did not speak at all. At last we tumbled upon a mutual language which, for the honor I bear you, I will not name, but it was neither Latin nor Arabic, nor the language of the Genoese, and if I called it lingua franca you would feel a legitimate annoyance. We had not spoken of many things before he told me his own characteristics, which were these, that he was a brave man but modest, that he had a contempt for riches, and was content to live upon the small income derivable from funds inherited from his father, that he revered the memory of his father, that he was devoted to his mother, who lived in a modest way in a provincial town, hating the extravagance of the capital. He further told me that he had been, by profession, a soldier, and upon my asking whether his stoical life were not diversified by some amusement, he answered that he had permitted himself certain recreations, but only those befitting the uniform he wore, and notably was he addicted to the chase of wild and powerful beasts. It is often remarked, he said, by those who know nothing of the business, that modern firearms have made the destruction of the larger carnivora too easy a task for the sportsman. This may in general be the case, but only if men are fighting under luxurious conditions. A man going out by himself with his gun, unaccompanied by a dog, and determined upon the destruction of some one considerable four-footed beast of prey, still runs a certain risk. You are right, said I, and a relative of mine who under such conditions attempted the bear, though having only designed to attempt wild foul in the impenetrable thickets of Scandinavia, was very bitterly disappointed and has been blamed for life. At this my companion was a little put out. The bear is not carnivorous, he said, and a brave man should be able to tackle a bear with his hands. I really cannot understand how your relative, as you call him, if he had a fouling piece, or even so much as a pocket pistol with a range of ten yards, could not shoot off a bear. But to return to my original thesis, which is that the larger carnivora are really dangerous to a man walking alone, however well-armed he may be, it was so armed, but undefended by companions, that I found myself on the borders of the Indian Ocean five years ago. Which borders of that vast sea did you inhabit, said I with some curiosity, and I was beginning to make a list of all its boundaries, including the magnificent but undeveloped districts which fringe the northwest of the great island of Australia, when he went on as though I had not spoken. A tiger, or I should rather say a tigress, growled in the dense underwood, and I was immediately upon the alert. Knowledge, I replied, is a remarkable thing. It amazes me and my friends who are familiar with the classics, though I believe there is very little to know in that department. Even the chemists astonish me, and the people who talk technically about warships are remarkable men. But I see that in your case, as in that of so many others, I have more to learn with every day I live. For there came a growl from the underwood, and you knew it to be that of a tiger, nay, of a tigress. But I continued, lifting my hand as he would interrupt me. Though it fills me with admiration, it does not make me hesitate for I know men who can talk a language after passing a week in the country to which it is native, and I beg you to fulfill my curiosity. I heard the growl of a tigress, said he, eager to continue his narrative, proceeding from the underwood which is called in that country Rauac. Why is it called Rauac, I interrupted. Because he explained with an intelligent look, it is composed of mirrored roots and cinchu, closely interlaced with a screen of wreaths ten feet higher or more waving above it. I told him that I now perfectly understood and desired to hear more. I heard, said he, the growl of a tigress, and I at once made ready my arm and prepared for the worst. When you say made ready your arm, I again interrupted him. I want to seize the matter clearly for the interest of your tale absorbs me. What exactly did you do to the instrument? For I am acquainted with a certain number of firearms, and each has to be prepared in a different manner. I pulled the bolt, he said, coldly, and then maintained a rather offended silence. Did you not snap the safety catch, said I, and some fear that I had put him out by my cross-examination? No, sir, said he. My rifle, for such it was, was adorned by no such appliance. But I pulled the spring ratchet home, and by way of precaution I pressed my thumb upon the main pin, for fear that the ratchet of the camber should slip from the second groove. Now I understand you perfectly, I said, and I beg you to continue. And as I said this, I leaned my head upon my hand so far as the jolting of the express train would allow me, and watched him with a thoughtful frown. Well, sir, went on the unknown in an independent manner, if you will believe me, when the beast sprang I missed him, I mean her. One moment, I said, one moment, I cannot believe you. You mean that you missed some vital spot, that you missed so enormous an animal in mid-air, as large as a cottage, and in full career to bear you down, fraught with death, with pain, and with defeat, spreading its arms like windmills, and roaring to announce its approach. That I will not believe. You are right, said he, eyeing me in an iron manner. I did not wholly miss the ferocious monster, or rather, monstress. When we sportsmen say miss, we mean hitting some part of the animal, which is not vital, or which still permits it to pursue its abominable purpose. At any rate, the Tigris, for such it was, fell to earth within a few feet of me. It did not reach me, it had miscalculated its spring. It is a curious point, said I, always desirous to pursue a conversation and to prolong it. How difficult it is for a man or a beast, for that matter, to estimate the distance which he has to jump. I well remember trying to jump the river brother, which is near the eastern boundary of my own country. You will allow me, he interrupted. No, sir, I continued. Pray let me tell you what I had to say, for it is in my mind that I wish to be rid of it. I well remember, I say, trying to jump the river, rather, and missing by three feet. But if you will, believe me. Will you allow me, he said, a little angrily? In a moment, sir, said I, in a moment. Well, I say I missed it by three feet, and many a friend of mine has missed things by a little minus. But the funny thing is that they never missed it by a little plus. Now isn't that worth judging? I did indeed know one case. I am determined, you shall allow me, said my companion, becoming earnest. One moment I pleaded, lifting my right hand slightly from the table. I was once with a man who had to jump from an old piece of fortification onto the top of a wall about ten feet off. And if he jumped not far enough, he fell into the soft ditch about five feet deep. But if he jumped too far, he fell into an enormous fos, a hundred feet deep. And by the Lord he jumped exactly three inches too far. Poor devil. Now if this Tigris of yours had only jumped just over your head, you would have had her at a disadvantage. You could have changed your front with a rapidity familiar to many of your profession, organize the concentrated fire against her just as she was executing her turning movement, and got her behind the shoulder blade. But there is no but, said he, with an impressive but rather dangerous solemnity. I say that the Tigris came to earth just in front of me, and advanced upon me by one and by two. I had no time to reload and to fire. I was all alone. What did I do? That is what I was waiting to hear, I said. It seems to me the climax of the whole story. I trust that you seized it, so I should say her upper jaw with your left hand, lower jaw with your right hand, and tore the head asunder. There is no quicker way with the Tigris. You are wrong, said he. Did you not then, I said suddenly, fasten both hands upon its throat, and digging your thumbs conversely from right and from left upon its windpipe, strangle it to death? Such a maneuver is a matter of moments. And he last best who laughs last. I did not, said he, in rising anger. At this moment the train began to slow down, and I knew the place it was approaching, for I am very familiar with the line. A porter who did not know me, but whom I secretly bribed, perceiving the danger of the circumstances, took my bag and made a great noise with it, and asked the number of questions. Everybody got up, and a crowd of us began to jostle down the gangway of the eating car. The hero was at first just behind me, and was beginning to explain to me what exactly he did to the Tigris, when we were unfortunately separated by two commercial travelers, a professional singer, and a politician. Fate dominates the lives of men, though will is a corrective of fate. Men in a restaurant car are like the leaves that flutter from trees, or like the particles of water in the eddying of a river. I drifted from him further and further still. When we came out upon the crowded platform, I saw the hero waving his hand to me, desiring to re-establish with me human and communicable things, and to tell me how we did at last destroy that mighty beast. But fate, which is the master of human things, would not have it so, and will, which is but a corrective of fate for us poor humans, stood me in no stead. We drifted apart, we never met again. He was off perhaps to shoot and miss some other Tigris, or who knows a tiger, and I to another town where I might yet again wonder at the complexity of the world and the justice of God. Anyhow, I never understood how we killed the Tigris. Were it not for the evidence of my senses, I should be willing to believe that the Tigris killed him. But we must never believe anything that is even apparently against the evidence of our senses. Farewell, dear mortals. The end of section 34 Section 35 On Anything How noble is our inheritance? The more one thinks of it, the more suffused with pleasure one's mind becomes. For the inheritance of a man living in this country is not one of this sort or of that sort, but of all sorts. It is indeed a necessary condition for the enjoyment of that inheritance that a man should be free, and we have really so muddled things that very many men in England are not free, for they have either to suffer a gross denial of mere opportunity. I mean, they cannot even leave their town for any distance, or they are so persecuted by the insecurity of their lives that they have no room for looking at the world. But if an Englishman is free, what an inheritance he has to enjoy. It is the fashion of great nations to insist upon some part of their inheritance, their military memories, or their letters, or their religion, or some other thing. But in modern Europe, as it seems to me, three or four of the great nations can play upon many such titles to joy as upon an instrument. For a man in Italy, or England, or France, or Spain, if he is weary of the manifold literature of his own country, can turn to its endurance under arms, in which respect, by the way, victory and defeat are of little account. Or if he is weary of these military things, or thinks that too continued contemplation of them, hurtful to the state, as it often is, for it goes to the head like wine, he can consider the great minds which his nation has produced, and which give glory to his nation, not so much because they are great as because they are national. Then again he can consider the landscape of his own land, whether peaceable, as do older men, or in a riot of enthusiasm, as do all younger men who see England in the midst of exercising their bodies, as it says in the Song of the Man Who Bicycled. And her distance and her sea, here is wealth that has no measure, all white England is my treasure, park and close and private pleasure, all our hills were made from me. Then he can poke about the cities and any one of them might occupy him almost for a lifetime. Hereford, for instance. I know of nothing in Europe like the Norman work of Hereford, or Ludlow, where you will perpetually find new things, or Leomidster just below, or Leadbury just below that again, and the inn of each of these three places is called the Feathers. Then a man may be pleased to consider the recorded history of this country, and to inform the fields he knows with the past and with the actions of men long dead. In this way he can use a battlefield with no danger of any detestable insolence or vulgar civilian ways, for the interest that a battlefield, if it is closely studied, becomes so keen and hot that it burns away all foolish violence, and you will soon find, if you study this sort of terrain closely, that you forget on which side your sympathies fail or succeed. An excellent corrective, if, as it should be with healthy men, your sympathies too often warp the evidence and blind you. On this account also one should always suspect the accuracy of military history when it betrays sneering or crowing, because in the first place that is a very unmilitary way of looking at battles, and in the second place it argues that the historian has not properly gone into all his details. If he had, he would have been much too interested in such questions as the measurement of ranges, or latterly the presence and nature of cover to bother about crowing or sneering. When a man tires of these there is left to him the music of his country, by which I mean the tunes. These he can sing to himself as he goes along, and if he ever tires of that there is the victuals and the drink, which if he is traveled he may compare to their advantage over those of any other land. But they must be national. Let him take no pleasure in things cooked in a foreign way. There was a man some time ago, in attempting to discover whose name, I have spent too much energy, who wrote a most admirable essay upon cold beef and pickles, remarking that these two elements of English life are retreating as it were into the strongholds, where England is still holding out against the dirty cosmopolitan mud, which threatens every country today. He traced the retreat of cold beef and pickles castward towards the city, from the west end all along Piccadilly and the Strand, right into Fleet Street, where he said they were keeping their positions manfully. They stand also isolated and besieged in one hundred happy English country towns. The trouble about writing an article like this is that one wonders about. It is also the pleasure of it. The limit or trammels to an article like this are that, by a recent and very dangerous superstition, the printed truth is punishable at law, and all one's memories of a thousand places upon the Igneal Way, the Stain Street, the Pilgrims Way, the River Zeus, all three of them, the Cornish Road, the Black Mountain, Farryside, the Three Rivers, all the Pennines, all the Chavoise, all the Cotswolds, all the Mendips, all the Chilterns, all the Melbourne Hills, and all the Downs, to speak of but a few, must be memories of praise by order of the court. One may not blame, therefore I say nothing of Norwich. Some men say that whereas wealth can be accumulated and left to others when we die, this sort of inheritance cannot, and that the great pleasure a man took in his own land, and the very many ways in which he found that pleasure, and his increase in that pleasure, as his life proceeded, all die with him. This you will very often hear, deplored, as noble a woman as ever lived in London used to say, speaking of her father, and she also is dead, that all she valued in him died with him, although he had left her a considerable fortune, by which she meant that, not only in losing him, she had lost a rooted human affection, and had suffered what all must suffer, because there is a doom upon us, but that those particular things in which he was particularly favored, had gone away forever. His power over other languages, and over his own language, his vast knowledge of his own country, his acquired courtesy and humor, all mellowed by the world and time. These, she said, were altogether gone. And to us of a younger generation it was her work to lament that we should never know what had once been in England. Among others she vastly admired the first Duke of Wellington, and said that he was tall, which was absurd. Now this noble woman, it seems to me, was in error, for all of us who have loved and enjoyed know not only that we carry something with us elsewhere, as we are bound to believe, but leave also in some manner which I do not clearly perceive, a legacy to our own people. We take with us that of which Peter Wanderweid spoke when he said, or rather, saying these lines. If all that I have loved and seen be with me on the judgment day, I shall be saved the crowd between, from Satan and his foul array. We carry it with us, and though it is not a virtue, it is half a virtue, and when we go down into the grave like the character of every man, there we'll go down with us, I think, not only good deeds, a severe female, but also a merry little hobbling comrade who winks and grins and keeps just behind her, so that he shall not be noticed and driven away. This little fellow will also speak for us, I think, and he is the pleasure we took in this jolly world. But I say that not only do we carry something with us, but that we leave something also. And this has been best put, I think, by the poet Ronsard, when he was dying, who said, if I have rightly translated him, this. Of all those vanities, he is speaking of the things of this world. The loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory, fame. No one of my time has been so filled with it as I. I have lived in it and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now I leave it to my country to garner and possess it after I shall die. So I go away from my own place, as satiated with the glory of this world, as I am hungry and longing for that of God. That is very good. It would be difficult to put it better. But if you complain here that Ronsard was only talking of fame or glory, why, I can tell you, that the pleasure one takes in one's country is of the same stuff as fame. So true is this, that the two commonly go together, and that those become most glorious, who have most enjoyed their own land. It is at once the most amusing and the most dramatic feature of our time that we can foresee, for some few years ahead, material things, things moral, escape us all together. Never was there a generation of Europeans who could less determine what the near future held for the fate of national characters, of religions, or of styles and art. The more foolish attempt to escape this ignorance by pretending that things moral depend upon things material. They observed the cutting of a canal and prophesied the decline of one nation upon its completion, the growth of another, as though the power of nations, armed, resided in something lower than the mind, and as though the success of armies, upon which all at last depends, were determined by their exchange of metals or by a new route of trade. Meanwhile, though the future, even the immediate future of nations and of faiths, is more closely hidden from us than ever. Yet it is entertaining, and as I have said, it is even dramatic to watch our power of prophecy over material things. We undertake works of such magnitude and spread over so long a span of years, they are accomplished under such conditions of international comprehension and security, that we can stand sometimes in a desert place and say, here, in five years, will be a town, or on a barren coast and say, here in five years will be a harbor. We can distract ourselves by imagining the contrast beforehand and by returning when the work is done, to see how nearly one has imagined the truth. Bezerda once afforded such an opportunity. Royce, now affords one, and so does that site, which set me writing this, and which I have just witnessed in a remote and hitherto quite silent valley. There, with little advertisement of public interest, one of the immemorial high roads of Europe is under restoration, and is about to return to life. The old high road into Spain. It is often remarked that the lines of European travel can hardly be permanently altered, that nature has designed them. Generations do sometimes pass in which some profound change in man, rather than in nature, affects a few of the great roads. The Roman line from the south northward, the highway from the Seon to the Straits of Dover, passing by Leon and Amiens, was deflected as the dark ages closed round the mind of Gaul. Water carriage succeeded the degraded high roads. The convergence of waterways in the basin of Paris made that basin the center of travel, and the old way by Leon was forgotten. Yet modern conditions restored it. The railway has done again what the Roman engineers accomplished, and Leon is once again halt upon the great road southwards, and once again the most direct avenue from the channel to the Mediterranean follows the plain to the east of Paris. So it has come to be with a road equally famous, equally forgotten, the high road from the north into Spain. The Pyrenees lie, as everyone knows, like an artificial wall between the valley of the Ibro and Gaul. How great the division is, only those can believe who have seen with their own eyes the meadows and the deep orchards of Byrne, and then after a painful crossing of the hills, have come upon the burnt deserts of Paragon. The road from one to the other, the administrative road which bounds Spain to Gaul, which connected Cesar Augusta with Toulouse, that is Saragossa with Toulouse, was Roman highway called the High Pyrenean, the highest and most central of the two main passes. It had, as I have said, Toulouse for its northern terminus, Saragossa for its southern. It had for two mountain towns or depots at the foot of either Climb, Oloran, the town of Ilaronis on the north, on the south, the bishops' town of Giacca. It had for its last outboat, just before the least steep Urdos, the Forum Ligenum, to the north, to the south, a cluster of huts and a station, whose Roman name has not come down to us, but which since the barbarian invasions has been called Can Franck. This great road, like so many throughout the empire, fell. You may yet trace its structure in those places where it is not identical with the modern way, but with the close of the empire and on nearly to our own time, its surface was left unrepared. Armies used it as they used all the great Roman roads of the north and the west till the 12th century. The Merovingians crossed it in their raid to the Ibro. Charlemagne sent men down it in the advance upon, and failure before, Saragossa. The expedition whose retreat was clinched by the destruction of his rear guard and the death of Rowland and Rantsevalas. It was still a gate for armies when the reconquest of Spain from the Mohammedan began. Giacca was free before any other town of the central north. Pusica fell before the first crusade was fought. Saragossa before the second. Baron and indeed all Christendom still used that high notch until the new civilization of the Middle Ages had set in with the 12th century. But from that beginning till our own time it was more and more forgotten. Spain reconquered, corresponded with Europe by the sea. The two land roads that ran into the peninsula to Christendom ran round either end of the Pyrenean chain. The central pass was abandoned when the great development of French roads, which was the work of Louis XIV, was initiated, most imperfectly by his grandson in Madrid. It was the road by Burgos, Vittoria, and Bayonne that was renewed. The commercial energy of the Catalans in the same generation opened the Perthias, broke into the Roussillon, and connected Barcelona with Perapignan and with Narbonne. But Aragon, the pivot and center of the Old Greek Conquest, Saragossa, the main town of the Roman communication with the north, lay off the two tracks of travel, half forgot Europe, and by Europe were ill remembered. It was Napoleon, or to be more accurate, the revolutionary crusade, which reopened the central pass, and here, as in so many other places, began to return the Roman things. While the armies of the empire with their train and their artillery were still tied to the sea road from the Roussillon, a small force without guns passed up the old Roman road, now come to be called the Sumport, marched over its silent grasses, wading the orioles, the bridge over which had long since fallen in, appeared suddenly before Gioca, occupied that citadel, and pursued the way to Saragossa, there to join the main army and to lay a siege memorable beyond all modern sieges for an heroic defense. Bonaparte seized the advantage of that passage. He desired a road over which artillery could go. It was one of twenty which he so desired over the mountain ranges of Europe, and which a full century has barely seen completed, for within four years of his resolution his supremacy was broken at Leipzig and destroyed at Waterloo. The third empire continued the tradition. The road was carried on up the French side of the pass, but the universal power of 1808 was gone and the Spanish approach was neglected. It was not till the other day, till our own generation, that the full work was done, and that the great street from Toulouse to Saragossa right over the hills was once more open to the full power of travel. Yet travel failed it. In the meanwhile the railroads had come. They had followed the coast roads, and the main line from Madrid to Paris ran torturously through the mountains of Castile, and turned twenty times in the labyrinth of Basque valleys between Victoria and Iran. Saragossa was still upon one side. Erocon still remained remote. The new road was empty beneath the cliffs of its great hills. To all this exception in Europe I had grown so used that I took pleasure during each of my yearly passages over this road, in noting its loneliness and in considering how the noise of this chief way between the south and the north had been silenced for so many centuries. The absence of men and the public knowledge was a perpetual, a renewed, and a permanent curiosity. There are many sides in Europe once peopled, now lonely, once famous, and now ignored. But this place seemed to be especially eccentric, and to have passed from something which had long been like the Emelian Way, or the stages of the Rhone Valley, to something as untouched as the uplands of Chivoy, or the moors of the West Riding over Ribble, and above Airdale. Very lonely places. This year I found that the last change had come. Far down they gave the ass, in the gorge where Abdurrahman led the Mohammedan invasion into Gaul. There came loud thunder, for all the world as though it were really thundering on the gloomy shoulders of any so many thousand feet beyond the clouds. Then as I neared the head of the vale I saw a man at it. He was at it in swarms. He had damned the torrents, he had fixed great turban tubes, and he had begun the hole in the hill. For just a few miles of the ridge itself there was still silence, and there is still silence above the gothard on the high road. But up from the Spanish valley, rolling up from it as it had rolled down the Vale de Espe, came again the human thunder. And when the road had fallen its two thousand feet and touched the water of the river Aragad, there again was man in great numbers, working like an ant burrowing under the terrible garganta, and determined upon his hole in the hill. The two tunnels will meet when each has accomplished three or four miles, and the work will be done. There will be a straight way from Paris to Madrid. The Pyrenees will have lost their unbroken line. The Roman scheme will have re-erisen. Saragossa will come forward again into the list of great European cities, and people will hear of Aragon. I do not know whether to be glad, seeing such proof that Europe always returns to itself. Or sorry. The end of Section 36. Section 37. On Anything. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Anything by Hilaire Belog. Section 37. On Two Towns. The wide countryside of Europe sum themselves up in central cities, municipalities inheriting from Rome. The lesser towns group round the larger, the bishop of the lesser suffraging to metropolitan of the greater cities, as it was fixed in the Roman order which Constantine inherited from Diocletian, and which everywhere stamps the west with the framework of the 4th century. These great cities are not only the heads and inspirers of their provinces. They are also the gathering places of armies. The contrast and the fellowship between them is especially seen when either is the capital of a wide plain below a mountain range. Then each becomes the depot and the goal in turn of invading forces. Each stands for the national fortunes upon either side of the passes. So for the great Elves you have Augsburg and Milan. So for the Vosages, Strasburg and Nancy. For the Pyrenees, Saragossa and Toulouse. No two cities in Europe are more representative of their provinces, or stand better for symbolizing the nature of their land. From the towers of each, the long line of the Pyrenees may be traced, especially in early autumn mornings when the sky is clear with the approaching cold and when the first snow has fallen upon the summits. From Toulouse the dark northern escarpment runs along the southern horizon, in a wall surprisingly level and seemingly tiny in its long stretch or belt of gray. From Saragossa, much further off, and more rarely, the white strips and patches can be caught behind the near foothills. The whole in a glare of sunlight full upon it, like a desert tilted up. You just see them over dry, treeless planes, and immediately the sun rises they are lost in the hot haze. The Pyrenees thus stand between the two cities and belong to each. And the legends of the mountain regard now one, now the other, or is in the song of Roland both combined, for the horn of Roland, as he died, was heard southward in Saragossa, northward in Toulouse. And the smoke of each may just be seen or guessed from certain heights, from passes that look southward into Aragon or northward into Aquitaine. Alone of the central bishoprics of these hills, they are united by a road and have so been united for two thousand years. Characteristically, in the true spirit of the Pyrenees, there is but that one great road between them. It takes man, and it has taken them since the legions made it, up by Husqa and Jaka, and so over the Summa's Pyrenees, the Sumport, then down by the deep valley of Beren to Oleron, to Pau to Tarbiz and down the river bank to Toulouse. All the armies have taken it. Through this paved gap went the first Frankish kings, still wild, wandering south for spoil, and through it in a tide poured the mohammed and host that so nearly seized upon Europe. All such marchings brought up under the walls of one or the other of the cities, Saragosa, for ever besieged from the north, Toulouse, beating off the raids from the south, fights similar wars. Each has its river, and the river of each is the life of the two provinces, on either slope of the mountains. The Ibro of Aragon, the Garona of Aquitaine, each has its port, the one, Barcelona, and the other, Bordeaux. And in each valley there is a separation of thought and custom, something like hostility between the inland city and the commerce of the sea. Each was for long the center of a nation, each afforded the title of a great house. Aragon was built up under its princes from that remote age, when the chieftain of a few mountain clans began to fight his way south against the infidels, till the light grew strong upon the twelfth century, and Alfonso fixed himself and the faith upon the Ibro. Toulouse grew under its counts to be almost the nation, ruling everything from the savents to the Pyrenees, and making a rallying place, schools of law, courts, and an imperial middle for all the fields of the Garona. So far the parallel between these twin cities holds, but the test of any appreciation of them is contrast. The landscape of Saragossa is a baked plain, ill-watered, and reflecting up to heaven the fierce sun of Spain, like a plate of bronze. The landscape of Toulouse is of fields and meadows with many trees. The Ibro trickles under the great bridge of Saragossa four weeks together, then perhaps dies altogether, becoming rather a stagnant pool or two rather than a river, then in spade rises high and threatening the piles, roaring high against them, and suddenly sinks again. The Garon runs in a broad, even stream, shallow, but full and never lacking water. It is already placid as it sweeps under the great bridge of Toulouse. Saragossa became the capital of a true kingdom whose language, traditions, and above all whose chivalrous aristocracy were its own. Toulouse went under in the false adventure of the Elbigenzian Sism. Saragossa was Mohammedan, a sort of northern bastion of Islam till far into the development of the Middle Ages, and it did not re-enter Christendom until 1118. The first crusade was long past, England was all Norman, while yet this city was governed by Asiatic ideas in contempt of Europe. Toulouse always Christian, rose against the unity of Christendom. Saragossa, in those struggles, got a great hero, and his legend, a man who fighting now for Islam and now for us, built up an epic, the Sid Campiador, the Challenger. Toulouse has no heroes. Saragossa became a pivot of steadfast faith, round which turned on and which reposed the reconquest of Spain by men of our race. Toulouse was, and today still is, perpetually seeking new things and divergence in Europe, a sort of smoldering fire. Today, full of denials of things sacred yesterday, dogma, the family, property, all the foundation, Saragossa lies indifferently, ready to become as it is becoming more wealthy and careless of these philosophical quarrels. The great churches of these two towns are in violent contrast too. At Toulouse, these are all of one pattern and old. The place where St. Saturninus, the evangelist of the city, died. The church of Toro, the bull, for a bull dragged him to death through the streets of the city, is of small Roman brick, plain steadfast. The vast cathedral to which his body was translated is of that same brick, and all the arches are Roman, round and small. The Dominican church is the same. A stranger sometimes takes one for the other. In Saragossa the cathedral is stamped with the fervor of the reconquest. It is crammed with detail and with infinite carving. It is very dark, high and silent, and at the same time with this wealth of creation of figures magical. Toulouse has no monument of faith other than those similar, early, simple and huge temples. Saragossa has the color, the tinsel, and the gorgeousness of the late Renaissance and the gilded basilica of the Pilar. Religion, which is at once the maker and the expression of states, differs utterly in mood between one city and the other. In Toulouse there is war. The men who deny and the men who affirm are edit with all the weapons of our time. As six hundred years ago they were edit with swords. You buy a newspaper and tend to warn the leading article will be an affirmation or denial of the creed, signed by some famous name. In Saragossa you may buy newspapers for months and get nothing but the common news two days old. Mass is crammed at Toulouse, empty in Saragossa. There are enemies of the mass in power at Toulouse, numerous, vigilant, convinced. In Saragossa a few eccentrics or none. Toulouse would persecute one way or the other, had it a power separate from the state. Saragossa was always tolerant. Of its few murders one was the popular murder of an inquisitor. There is something that sleeps in Saragossa for all its liveliness and wealth and dare. There is something that wakes and prowls in Toulouse for all its ancient walls and green things growing upon ruins as they grew in Rome. These are the two cities as I know them. Often upon a hide upon the Pyrenees I have thought how one lay beneath me to the left and the other to the right, the end of a chance journey. All human tracks from the mountains seem to lead down like watercourses to one or the other place and travel flows of its own way to the sunlit marketplace of Saragossa or to the capital of Toulouse from every saddle in the hills. You may be in the Cerdanie, which is Catalan, or in Rontseveils, which is Basque, but if you are on foot and wish to go far the roads will bring you insensibly to the great town on the Ebro. You may be as far west as St. Jean Pied de Porte or as far east as X, but on the northern slope insensibly you will be driven to Toulouse. The two cities are the reservoirs of life on either slope of the hills and each holes as it were a number of threads which are paths and roads radiating out to the high crossings of the chain. And as I consider the two towns, whether near them as I lately was or here at home, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining their future as in remembering their long past and the sharp picture of the present time. The provinces of Europe develop, but they do not change their identity. If it be paradoxical to suggest wealthy Saragossa and a fanatical Toulouse, yet it is not out of keeping with the revolutions of Europe. Saragossa is on the road to wealth in a country which is rapidly accumulating. Toulouse is well on the road to fanaticism and religious war. One can see Toulouse with great artists and fierce rhetoric, standing out against some reaction of thought in the Republic or captured by the flame that has set fire to lords. One can see Saragossa dragged into the orbit of Barcelona, drifting with the rising wealth of Mediterranean commerce, forgetting alters and sharing the mere opulence of the Catalan's. Such thought leads one to fantastic guesses. It is provoked by the modern character of these two great unwritten, ill-known Pyrenean towns, in one of which the chief quarrel of our time is so actively pursued, in the other of which lies all the new promises of Spain. And that reminds me, Saragossa has no song of its own. Toulouse has one called, if the Garone had only wished, she might. So much for Saragossa and Toulouse. The end of Section 37. Section 38. On Anything. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Anything by Hilaire Belock. Section 38. On the Judgment of Robespierre. It is of little profit, said Robespierre severely, that we should debate what may or may not come to pass in that time. You speak of more than a hundred years, and of a season when the youngest child before us shall have long been dead, and his child too perhaps be dead after him, and for that matter even if it profited us, it would not be to the service of God, for we must say what is true and defended. As for the rest, no man is master of destiny. He was about to make an allusion to the people of Epirus, and to a discovery of theirs which he had read in the classics upon this subject, when Saint Just interrupted, as was his way, with burning eyes in a sort of high rhetorical facility, which gave all his young words such amazing power. He was sitting in an attitude one might have thought listless, so lightly, did his delicate hand lean upon his knee, saved that all thought of carelessness left one, when one watched the intensity of his face, and he repeated a phrase which its rhythm has made famous. The things we have said will never be lost on earth. It was in the weeks after Flouris, Charlotte Ropespear, ill-tempered and silent, sat like a sort of guardian of the room upon a little sofa by the western wall of it, the darkest side. Catherine was there, the cripple, his face permanently stretched by pain, and there also almost foreign, English or Italian, one might have said from their length, shown the delicate features of Fouchet, his thin lips firm and inevitably ironical. Paris was glorious, there was a festivity in the sky of that July, a cool air in the sunlit streets, and that sort of clear sound which comes up from the gulfs of narrow ways when Paris and summer is at the full of its life. The sunlight upon a courtyard, shown reflected from the white walls of it into the darkness of the little room where the friends sat talking together before they should go down to the parliament. In the shed outside was the noise of their host, the carpenter, sawing, a very quiet and respectful young man, the son of the house, and secretary to Ropespear, ventured an opinion. He had a wooden leg, and his expression was not intelligent. When these two generations of men had passed, he said, the goddess of liberty would be firm upon her throne. It would be the chief advantage of the passage of time, that men would forget all the old days of slavery, and that the evil thing which the revolution was occupied in destroying would be remembered only as a sort of nightmare of humanity, the insolent palaces which might remind men of their tyrants will have been pulled down long ago, and their geegaws of pictures have been left to molder. He foresaw, and was about to describe at some length the reign of virtue and equality among men. When Ropespear interrupted him severely in his high voice, and bade him not to peer wet upon the stump of his wooden leg, which wore the carpet of the citizen, his father, and was moreover an ungainly gesture. He further told him, with increased severity, that the arts in a state of free men would always be decently cherished, but for a few weeks before he had been delighted to sit for his portrait to Monsieur Grouès. There was a little silence following this reprimand. If it be of any moment to you, he continued, I can, I think, tell you something certainly that society will hold, for they have invariably accompanied liberty in her majestic march. Men will respect the labor and the property of others, and the power of peace, and war will reside with the people. It is to this, he added earnestly, that I have given my chief efforts, and I believe I have placed it upon a secure foundation. What I am most afraid of, he mused, is the power that may be put into the hands of representatives. But that again will be tamed by long usage. I shall soon see to it that the places of meeting are made largely public, and I have drafted a design, whereby it shall be death, or at least exile, to plan so much as a municipal building for the meetings of municipal bodies, unless the galleries permit a full view of the debate, and accommodate a number of citizens not less than five times the total number of the elected. It would be better, he sighed, in conclusion, that a law should compel at intervals great meetings in the open, and should punish by the loss of civic power all those who did not attend, unless, indeed, they had been given leave of absence by some magistrate. St. Josh was weary of the war, and asked him how long it would continue. It will continue, said Robespierre, firmly, and in the tone of a man who can speak more definitely of near things than of distance. It will continue until the winter at least, upon which occasion, I design. At this point, Charlotte, whose temper was not improved by such discourses, abruptly left them. They heard the sharp hurrying of her footsteps across the flags of the courtyard. She was going up to her own room, overlooking a street. Fouché smiled. You smile, Fouché, said Robespierre, displaying very obvious irritation, because you think, as politicians do, that war is an unaccountable thing. Let me tell you that reason here is much stronger than chance, and that the forces opposed to us are already convinced of liberty. I have before me, he pulled out his little brown book from his pocket, a list of pamphlets recently distributed beyond the frontiers, and a very good estimate of the numbers of their readers. Fouché restrained his smile. He was a man capable of self-control to any limit. He lent his long, delicate, refined head upon the tapering fingers of his left hand, and listened with great apparent interest to what the master was saying. The sawing in the courtyard, without ceased, and his host, the carpenter, entered in that reverential way which marks the sentiment of religion, and very silently took a distant chair to listen to the master's discourse. Cuthon shifted himself in his place to relieve his crippled members, and Robespierre continued. Nothing endures unless it be based upon virtue. But though virtue tends to corrupt with time, and though liberty is rather for what the fanatics have called angels than for men, yet if men's chains are broken it has great chance of permanence and of an effect upon the public. I have upon this matter. He continued pulling out of a pocket a chagrin case, and from that case a pair of spectacles. Certain notes that will not be without interest for you. Fouché sighed while Robespierre was seeking among a group of neatly folded papers for what he had to read. His host, the carpenter, bent forward to hear as a man might bend forward to hear the reading of the gospel. He even had an odd instinct to stand up and listen with bowed head. Saint Just was thinking of other things, and certainly any modern man looking on would have been compelled to watch Saint Just deep in luminous eyes. He had already forgotten the future, and once again he was thinking of the wars. He had begun to take pleasure in the charges. A moment might have made him, from poet that he was, a soldier, and while the high thin voice of the little man Robespierre went on, with appropriate gestures, describing the permanence of virtue in a free state, he clearly saw what he had seen but a few days before from the lines. The houses of the beleaguered city against the June dawn, and he heard the buccals. Robespierre had begun. The sentiment of property which is native in man proceeds from what he gives to nature by his toil, and this is respected by all, yet even property itself cannot be thought secure until virtue be there to guarantee it. No laws can make up for its absence. It is virtue, therefore, upon which even this essential, without which society cannot be, reposes, and virtue which will cause a poor man to be equal with a rich, while the one regards the other without envy, upon the one side, without contempt upon the other. For a full quarter of an hour Robespierre went on and Kethu as a matter of ritual, and the master of the house as a matter of religion listened. The one as a matter of course, the other ardently. And when he had finished his little peroration, when he had taken off those spectacles and wiped them, when he had turned upon them his pale, small, watchful, grey-green eyes, he noted that Fouchet alone had been in constant. Fouchet had his back turned and was looking out of a window. A boy who passed through the courtyard whistling, carrying a short ladder, looked out the window for a moment and saw, the aquiline, refined face, covered with laughter. The boy thought that laughter merely friendly. He waved his hand and smiled and answered, and Fouchet saw, in that boy, the generation that should arise. He composed his features and turned them once more towards the room, before Robespierre could speak sharply, as he meant to speak, and complain of such inattention. He said in a clear, well-modulated voice, that he had never heard those sentences before. Was Robespierre to pronounce them that day in Parliament? I shall do so, said Robespierre, if I am permitted by the President to speak. If not, I will reserve my remarks for another occasion. He pulled out a fat little round watch, prettily enameled, touched the lay, said his wrists, settled the order of his stock, and said, as the schoolmaster might say to young St. Just, are you not coming with me? St. Just startled suddenly, like a man awakened, thought of the hour, remembered the Parliament, and went out with his friend. Fouchet, with his hand to his chin, crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs to that part of the house which overlooked the rue Saint-Honor. He had something to say to Charlotte. Coutan, who was hungry, remained till lunch, but found his host dull and a little ill-tempered. He could not fill the void that had been left by Robespierre. The End of Session 38 The End of On Anything by Hilaire Belock