Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

I confess I can never read that line but I remember a certain river of twenty years ago, nor does revisiting that stream and seeing it again with my eyes so powerfully recall what once it was to those who loved it as does this deathless line. It seems as though the magical power of the poet escaped the effect of time in a way that the senses cannot, and a man curious in such matters might find the existence of such gifts to be a proof of human immortality. The pace at which Milton rides his verse, the strong constraint within which he binds it, deeply accentuate this power of rhythm and the mystical effect it bears. Now you would say a trumpet, now a chorus of human voices, now a flute, now a single distant song. From the fortieth to the fifty-fifth line of the third book _Paradise Lost_ has all the power and nature of a solemn chant; the large complaint in it is the complaint of an organ, and one may say indeed in this connection that only one thing is lacking in all the tones Milton commanded; he disdained intensity of grief as most artists will disdain intensity of terror. But whereas intensity of terror is no fit subject for man's pen, and has appealed only to the dirtier of our little modern fellows, intense grief has been from the very beginning thought a just subject for verse.

[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloenta
Ampyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmên
Krêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê Aphroditê
Hêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' Hektôr
Ek domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]

Milton will have none of it. It is the absence of that note which has made so many hesitate before the glorious achievement of _Lycidas_, and in this passage which I quote, where Milton comes nearest to the cry of sorrow, it is still no more than what I have called it, a solemn chant.

.... Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

There is one other character in Milton wherein he stands not so much for English Letters as for a feature in English nature as a whole, which is a sort of standing apart of the individual. Where this may be good and where evil it is not for a short appreciation to discuss. It is profoundly national and nowhere will you see it more powerfully than in the verse of this man. Of his life we all know it to be true, but I say it appears even in his verse. There is a sort of _noli me tangere_ in it all as though he desired but little friendship and was not broken by one broken love, and contemplated God and the fate of his own soul in a lonely manner; of all the things he drew the thing he could never draw was a collectivity.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

What a great thing it is in this perplexed, confused, and, if not unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is cleanly itself! What a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. Hans Christian Andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition is justified. Of men for whom so much and more is said by their contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? Contemporary praise has a way of gathering dross. We all know why. There is the fear of this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance philosophy of the moment over-weighing the praise-giver. In a word, perhaps not half-a-dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed tradition. It is not to be pretended that according to that test so must men be judged. Many of the very greatest, Hugo for instance, and in his line, Huxley (a master of English); or, again, to go further back, the great Byron, would not pass the test.

Things have been said about most men, great or little, in our fevered time, so exaggerated, so local and so lacking balance, whether of experience or of the fear of posterity, that contemporary opinion should not be allowed by its misfortunes to weigh them down. But a man has a quality of his own when he is so made that even his contemporaries do him justice, and that was the case with Hans Christian Andersen. I will bargain that if our letters survive five hundred years, this excellent writer will quietly survive. Even the French may incorporate him. And next it is the business of one who praises so much to ask in what the excellence of this writer consists. It is threefold: in the first place, he always said what he thought; in the second place, he was full of all sorts of ways of saying it; and, in the third place, he said only what he had to say.

To say what one thinks, that is, to tell the truth, is so exceedingly rare that one may almost call it a grace in a man. Just those same manifold strings which pull contemporary criticism hither and thither, and which have made me suggest above that contemporary criticism commonly belittles a man in the long run, just those same strings pull at every writer to make him conform to what he knows to be false in his time. But some men--with limitations, it is true, and only by choosing a particular framework--manage to tell the truth all their lives; those men, if they have other literary qualities, are secure of the future.

And this leads me to the second point, which is that Andersen could not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a hundred different things. Now this character has been much exaggerated among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. It is not the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing. There is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. This quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called "characters"; and whether we recognise those "characters" as portraits drawn from the real world (they are such in Balzac), or as figments (they are such in Dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such in Shakespeare and in Homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature to the creative power.

Lastly, I say that Andersen said what he had to say and no more. This quality in writers is not restraint--a futile word dear to those who cannot write--it is rather a sort of chastity in the pen. The writer of this kind is one who unconsciously does not add; if any one were to ask him why he should not add an ornament or anything supposititious, he would be bewildered and perhaps might answer: "Why should I?" The instinct behind it is that which produces all terseness, all exactitude, and all economy in style.

Andersen, then, had all those three things which make a great writer, and a very great writer he is.

Note that he chose his framework, or, at any rate, that he was persuaded to it. He could not have been so complete had he not addressed himself to children, and it is his glory that he is read in childhood. There is no child but can read Hans Christian Andersen, and I at least have come across no man who, having read him in childhood, does not continue to read him throughout life. He wrote nothing that was not for the enlivening or the sustenance or the guiding of the human soul; he wrote nothing that suggested questions only. If one may speak of him in terms a trifle antiquated (or rather for the moment old-fashioned), he was instinct with charity, and therefore he is still full of life.

Having said so much of Andersen in general, something should be said of him in particular. He was Northern; you always feel as you read him that if his scene is laid in the open air, the air is fresh and often frosty; that if he is talking indoors the room is cosy and often old. Certain passions which the North lacks are lacking in him, both upon their good and upon their evil side. He is never soldierly, and he is never revengeful; he is never acute with the desire for life, but, again, he is never envious. Those who read him and who are also Northern may well be in love with Denmark. It is a triumph of our civilisation that this little land, quite outside the limits of the Roman Empire, not riven by any of the Empires' great vital resurrections, undisturbed by the vision of the Twelfth and of the Thirteenth Centuries, spared from the march of Napoleon's armies, should be so completely European. What could be more European to-day than that well-organised, contented, peasant State? It is a good irony to put against the blundering prophecies of barbaric people that beyond the Germanies this secure and happy State exists. One might put it in a phrase a little too epigrammatic and say that as one reads Hans Christian Andersen one remembers Elsinore, and one recalls the good architecture of Copenhagen. If ever any misfortune again shall threaten that State, and if barbarism attempts to play the fool with it, something that really is the conscience of Europe and not the empty and sham organisation to which that phrase is too often prostituted will arise and protect the Danes.

THE CHRISTMAS OF 1808

No British Army in force has capitulated in Europe for many generations. It is the peculiar historical position of this country. That historical fact lends to the common history of the schools and universities an attitude towards military history in general which is commonly distorted, but it lends to the policy of the country as a whole a confident tradition, the strength and value of which it is impossible to exaggerate.

The nearest touch to such a disaster, if we except the sieges, was passed during the days in which these words are written and read; the close thing came about in the days just before and just after Christmas, one hundred and two years ago. I will attempt to describe as simply as I can the nature of that adventure.

It must first of all be premised that, in the words of Napier, position determines the fate of armies. No truth is more apparent to the soldier, none more forgotten by the civilian--and more especially by the civilian touched with the unmilitary vice of Jingoism. Position determines the fate of armies, and, armaments being supposedly equal, he is a great or a fortunate general who, in the critical moment, has so arranged matters that disposition is upon his side, or who by some stroke of luck is in that advantage. There are exceptions to this truth. Certain decisive battles (though very few) have utterly determined campaigns; and among these battles some, again, have been won at a drive, and by a sort of impetus, the factor of position being so simple as to be negligible, or so equally balanced as to advantage neither side and be eliminated. But, as a rule, it is true even of decisive actions, that position is the determining factor. It is necessarily true of the strategy of a campaign, and it is with this consideration that I return to the particular crisis of the British Army at the close of December 1808.

Sir John Moore, as every one knows, had raided right into the North of Spain, with the object of withdrawing the pressure of the French upon the South of that country. It was in the South that French ambition had found its first check, and that Napoleon's plan had been warped by the unexpected and, as it were, impossible capitulation of Baylen. Close upon twenty thousand of the French forces had there laid down their arms. The Emperor came in person to restore the fortunes of his house; it was in the South that resistance could best be expected; by the occupation of the South that he might put himself at ease over the whole territory, and from the South that the English operations were destined to draw him.

On the 21st of December, a Wednesday, Lord Paget, with the Tenth and Fifteenth Hussars, surprised an advanced body of French Cavalry at Sahagun. It was the extreme limit of Moore's great raid; the town was occupied, and all the Thursday, all the Friday, Moore halted there with his force of some twenty-three thousand and sixty guns. He was nearly two hundred miles from the port on the sea-coast, whereto he must retire if he would escape. In front of him was Soult, against whom it was his business, if he were undisturbed, to march from Sahagun immediately; but upon his right, nearly as far off as the sea, though not quite so far, a matter of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy miles, Napoleon, at Madrid, commanded the best and the largest of the armies in Spain. Sixty thousand men, with a hundred and fifty guns, lay at the gates of Madrid, and during those same hours in which the British Army had marched into Sahagun, Napoleon's great force began to move northward over the Guadarrama.

I will not here describe that famous march: I have done so elsewhere at greater length: but the reader, to appreciate the conditions of this great duel, must imagine a country denuded and largely mountainous, deep in snow, and subject throughout those days to intolerable weather; and the race upon the issue of which depended so many and such final things was run at a time and in a place when one would have thought that no man could be abroad. But the protagonists of the Revolutionary wars were not men like ourselves.

Christmas Day fell upon the Sunday. Moore had got ahead of his supplies; they had reached him on the Friday, and on the Saturday, Christmas Eve, he had intended to go forward and attack the opponent before him. But on that same Friday when, in the night, his Infantry were already beginning to march eastward, he heard of Napoleon's amazing feat; he knew that he had succeeded in drawing the great commander northward, but he knew also, since that commander could work miracles, that the distance separating them would be crossed with a swiftness not to be measured by the old rules of war, and that the vast force three times his own would, if he hesitated, be found holding the snow-blocked roads between his position and the sea. The order to advance was cancelled, the order to retreat was given. By Christmas Eve Baird and Hope were on the line of the Esla River; on Christmas Day, Sunday, the troops were passing that obstacle. On Monday, the 26th, the baggage and the last of the army, under Moore's own eye, were crossing by the bridge of Castro Gonzalo before Benevente, and the trick was done. There was a thick fog, the passage was far slower than the strained intelligence of the imperilled commander had designed. On that same day, the 26th, Napoleon was at Tordesillas, one long day's march away from the Esla River. He had covered in that dash of three days and a half a hundred and twenty miles, but he was too late. He was too late by half a day.

In the dark and storm-driven night of that Monday the extreme van of Napoleon's horse rode up to the bridge of Castro Gonzalo. They were unsupported, of course, and rode far before the army to discover; but, though it was not contact in any serious sense, there is something very worthily dramatic in the appearance of those tall horsemen suddenly in the night through the blinding snow, come up just too late to do more than watch the escape of Moore's column.

By the next day the purpose of the British commander was achieved: Napoleon knew he could no longer intercept: the bridge was destroyed. The opportunity of recording the envelopment and destruction of a British force was lost to Napoleon; he abandoned to Soult the further long pursuit, which is called in history the retreat upon Corunna.

ON COMMUNICATIONS

There is nothing more curious in the material change which is passing so rapidly over the modern world than what I may call the Romance of Communication.

With the Romance of Discovery every one is thoroughly acquainted. The modern world is saturated with that form of romance; it has permeated all our literature and is still the theme of most of our books of travel. But like all things which have attained a literary position, the Romance of Discovery already belongs to the past. Not that nothing remains to be discovered: on the contrary, the modern world has hardly yet begun to appreciate how it may penetrate from detail to detail and find perpetually something new in that which it thinks it knows, but the great broad unknown spaces, the horizons quite new to Europeans which break upon them for the first time, are now no longer left to the explorer. With the romance of communication, luckily for us, there is another, a newer and, in a certain sense, a much wider field. Many who have travelled largely have felt this, but it has not yet, I think, been expressed.

What I mean by the Romance of Communication is this: that the establishment of regular lines for ocean traffic, the building of railways and, above all, of good roads, have made it possible for a multitude of men to see those contrasts which travel can afford, and this development of modern travel has just begun to afford our generation, and will afford with much greater generosity the generation to come, an opportunity for feeling physically the complexity and variety and wonder of the world. This is a good thing.

Not so long ago it was a difficult matter for a man to go from some Northern part of Europe, such as England, to so isolated a community as that which inhabits the Island of Majorca. Now it is easy for a man and costs him but a few pounds to go from England to Barcelona, and from Barcelona he can sail with a rapid and regular service to the port of Palma. When he reaches that port he cannot but feel the Romance, finding this little isolated State wealthy and contented in the midst of the sea. Corsica, of which men know so little, is similarly at hand to-day, and so are the Valleys of the Pyrenees, especially of the Spanish valleys upon which as yet there is hardly any Northern literature or experience. In a year or two we shall have the railway through the Cerdagne, and another line will take one up the Valley of the Ariège into the middle part of Northern Spain.

But of all these benefits to the mind which the modern charge is procuring, I know of none more remarkable than the entry into the Desert.

That portion of Northern Africa which the French have reclaimed for Europe, and which was throughout the existence of the Roman Empire an integral part of European civilisation, consists of the great tableland buttressed to the north and the south by mountain ranges, and crossed in its middle part by parallel outcrops of high rock. This plateau stretches for somewhat more than a thousand miles all along the southern shore of the Western Mediterranean. If the reader will take a map he will see jutting out from the general contour of Africa, an oblong as it were, the eastern end of which is Tunis, the western end Morocco. All that oblong is the tableland of which I speak. The coast is warm, fertile, densely cultivated and populous; full of ports and cities and the coming and going of ships. The highlands behind and to the south of the coast line are more arid, very cold in winter, baking in summer, and always dry and rugged to our Northern eyes. But they are habitable, the population is spreading upon them, and they contain the past relics of the old Roman civilisation which prove what man can do with them when their water supply is stored and their soil is cultivated.

Now this habitable land suddenly ceases, and falls into the Desert of Sahara. The demarkation is abrupt and is everywhere noticeable to the eye. It is indeed more noticeable in the eastern than in the western part. The limit between what Miss Bell has called, in a fine book of hers, "the Desert and the Sown," is more than a day's march in width upon the Moroccan frontier; indeed it is several days' march, and one is not over-sure when one has left the habitable soil and when one has reached the inhospitable sand at the eastern end. The limits are not only marked sharply by a differentiation in the climate and the vegetation, but also by an abrupt escarpment. The Atlas (as the plateau of Northern Africa is generally called) falls in huge, precipitous red cliffs right down upon the Sahara. It so happens that these cliffs, just at the point where they are most abrupt and most rugged, and most romantic, are cleft by a profound gorge through which the Wady Biskra runs very clear and cold, filled with the melting of the snow upon the high mountain of Aures to the north of it. This gap in the cliffs the Romans knew well. They had a military station here to guard them against the ravages of the nomad tribes who afterwards, in the form of the Arabian Invasion, overran their African province and turned it from an European and a Christian to an Asiatic and Mohammedan thing. The Romans called that gorge "The Kick of Hercules," as though the god had here by a stroke of his foot broken away from the cultivated north toward the Desert. Through this gap ran their military road, and here, as a formation of the gorge demanded, they carried that road over the river, the Wady Biskra, upon the bridge the stones of which still remain, though renovated and supported by modern work, to recall the greatness of the empire.

The Arabs, in their turn, have called this astonishing breach "Foum es Sahara"--the mouth of the Sahara; and, as is always the case where they found a Roman bridge, they have added the name El Kantara, the bridge. For it is remarkable that the Arabs were unable to continue Roman work, especially in masonry, save where they had a large Roman population to help them after their conquest, and the bridges which the Romans had built were regarded by them with a sort of superstitious reverence.

Now this Mouth of the Sahara, this gap in the glaring wall of the Desert, has, by a coincidence which has its obvious geographical cause, and which is to be discovered in many another pass throughout Europe and Northern Africa, served for modern methods of communication the purpose which it served for the ancients. It is the nearest approach which the Desert makes to the sea-coast; it is the approach involving the least engineering effort, the most obvious and the most natural entry from the northern cultivated land on to the waterless sandy waste. Therefore, modern civilisation has used it, and you get here more than anywhere else that romance of sudden contrast with which, as I have said, modern methods of travel have gifted the modern world. The French first built down this track a military road, as hard, excellent and well graded as any that you will find in Europe. It not only goes through the gorge, but right on into the sand of the desert, bounded upon either side by masonry, and it has reached, or very soon will reach, Biskra without a break.

Some time after this road had been planned, a railway was constructed along the same track, with certain divergences where the gradient of the highway was too steep for the rails and where therefore long curves were necessary. Whether a man goes by the road or the rail, this is what he sees--and he had best see it in early spring, or what is with us in England late winter. As the road and the rail wind downwards from the little plateaux, by great steps as it were from one level to another, the traveller has about him such scenery as has accompanied him for the last hundred miles: fields of cotton, the trees proper to a temperate climate, and rugged, rocky ridges cropping up from the cultivated soil. There is nothing around him to remind him of what is called "The East," except the camel preceding its master up or down the great highway and the distinctive dress of the natives; for the climate, the crops, and the temperature, the quality of the sunlight, he might be on one of the plains of Western America, which indeed this part of Africa most nearly resembles.

He comes to a clean little inn entirely French in architecture, surrounded by a cool and quiet garden, and with the river running behind it. He walks on a few hundred yards through the gorge, and quite suddenly at the turning of a corner the Desert and all its horizon breaks upon his eyes. He sees a waste of hot, red, unusable sand, a brilliant oasis of palm trees, and even the sun, small and glaring above that plain, seems something different from the familiar light which he had received but an hour before.

It is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable revelation which modern travel affords. And if I had to advise any one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel, at least in the way of landscape, I would advise him to visit this astounding place. It has already found its way into many English books, but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how exceedingly easy is its access. For travellers even to so near a place like to put on an air of mystery. There is no one with a fortnight to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes travel difficult). Any one who will take that journey would have a memory to last him all his life.

There are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is the spoiling of them. I have never been able to agree. Places are not spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by the character of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place of the East and the West, I think, save with a desire to wonder and to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. Such men may come in any numbers and the place will be the better for them. At any rate, I repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand, for as yet hundreds of Englishmen with far more than that leisure and infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its opportunities; and your quickest way is by Marseilles and Bona, and on your way I beseech you to stop and see Timgad, which is a dead Roman city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the Edge of the Desert.

ASTARTE

If you stand outside the old fortifications of the town of Toul and look eastward toward the German peoples, you see a long even line of hills, very high but not quite mountainous; they end in a sharp dip, and rise again, and terminate in an isolated summit which, like so many of the striking conical peaks of Europe, is dedicated to St. Michael.

These heights, like all the crests which surround the basin of that entrenched camp, are fortified, both with complete works and with connecting trenches and batteries; save in the gap between the isolated hill and the ridge I have mentioned the guns are everywhere. In this gap, in the hollow of it and upon the hillside, is a little village which, like all the villages on the actual line of the encircling forts, is wholly dominated by the soldiery; these furnish it with all its trade, these give it its few adventures and its manner of life. The peasants are woken summer and winter by the sound of bugles; the heavy firing of practice is a usual thing to them; a profitable commerce with a garrison twice as numerous as the civil population enriches those who work upon their land.

In this village there lived one of those families which are poor in a country of free men through their own fault; they had land, of course; no rent was asked of them; they were in a community which had now for many ages administered itself, and had for more than a hundred years forgotten the oppression of a territorial class. Nevertheless, by some vice of temperament, they lived like slatterns, and if they cultivated at all some tiny patch of their ruined and weedy holding, it was but just so much as would keep their souls within their bodies, and they preferred chance begging and barefoot jobs at the railway-station or in the streets of the town. Their house was more a cave than a hut; it was dug out of the hillside, with beaten earth walls, save where the front portion of it jutted out, and was roofed with old bits of corrugated iron borrowed or stolen from the sappers. These were supported by a jumble of ramshackle wood, old railway-sleepers, and here and there were gaps stopped roughly with canvas.

In such a place, surrounded by brothers and sisters of all ages, and the only houseworker to a drunken and worthless mother, lived, by accident, one of those women who have such great power in this world. Her ugliness was singular; it had nothing to do with that power save perhaps to enhance it. Her hair, which was sparse and crisp, was of a bright, unpleasing red, harsh and offensive; her eyes were green and stood very far apart in her head; her mouth was large and very decided and firm. It is not by any recapitulation of her features (though any one who had once seen them would always remember them) that one can give the impression of her power. This rather proceeded from a gesture, a manner, and a whole being which was the continual outer manifestation of a certain kind of soul. There was strength in all her gestures, an upstanding challenge in the poise of her body whether she worked or walked, and a sort of creative handling of things whenever she grasped them which at once arrested the attention of a man. Her excessive poverty and the gross carelessness of her surroundings, by contrast greatly enhanced these things.

The young soldiers cared very little for mysteries; their religion was indifferent to them, their knowledge of the perils and of the adventures of the soul was less than that of children; for those who might have guessed at the mysterious things which everywhere surround our existence, even at twenty-one, had such imaginings drowned and purged out of them by continual labour in the open air, by hours of grooming and of riding, by the deep and glorious fatigue of such a life, by sleep in the night, by hunger and by fellowship. Nevertheless, among the more leisured, that is, among the non-commissioned officers, there was one man who fell under the spell. He was handsome, unintelligent, lacking in judgment, and perhaps twenty-five years of age. His father was a large farmer to the north of Rheims; he had a very fair allowance from home; he was regular and did his service well; he was, so far as the non-commissioned ranks can be in any army, popular with the men. This fellow felt the spell. He felt it neither deeply nor violently, for his nature was one on which the great emotions could have no play; but he would seek such duties as brought him to the village, he would intrigue to be sent upon any inspection of the reserve forces or with provisions up into the forts, or upon any other business which would give him for a few moments a chance of seeing her at the door of that miserable hovel, and of exchanging half-a-dozen words from the saddle. His leave he would often spend in the inn of that village, some said in her company (but I doubt if this were true); he would have taken her once into Nancy to see some public show or other, but she would not go.

Between the end of winter and the start for camp, the thing had become as much a habit to him as his own name, and by a sort of code which the regiment observed, his habit was respected and passed by; indeed, to have become so immeshed regarded no one but himself, and the singular net that had been thrown over him was not one which others envied. But there was one who envied him.

When he had been Vaguemestre, that is, the sergeant deputed to fetch the letters of the regiment, and often also when he had gone out to note the condition of the reserve horses or upon any other message, he had taken with him one of the two-year men, a Belgian who had crossed the frontier to find work in his teens, and was not ill content to have been caught by the conscription, for he was utterly destitute and knew neither father nor mother. This man was dark, short and broad; he was kindly in temper and, one would have said, an animal for stupidity. He was possessed of great physical strength; he was a faithful servant and follower where he was employed. And his Sergeant who thus favoured him would often see to it that his service should be lightened in one way or another, and made his life more easy to him than it was to the other drivers of the battery. He was popular, every one helped him, he had done harm to no one, he was always willing. He very rarely spoke, amid all that voluble clatter of young men, and when he did, it was to crack some simple peasant joke or to repeat some old tag of a proverb.

But one day the head of the room who happened to have no stripes and was no more than an older soldier, or, as it was called in that service, "an ancient," found him sitting on his bed and crying. The lout was crying in a gentle but despairing sort of way. The ancient was a rough man, a miner and rather brutal. He would have none of it. And just as he was making things rough for the Belgian, the Sergeant's voice came down the wooden corridors calling him to saddle the two beasts: and all the Belgian did was to refuse. It was a quite unheard-of thing. There was no elasticity in the service; and if any one in authority said "Do this," to say "I will not," or even to be slow in obedience, was as grave, or rather as unknown, as is a crime of violence among wealthy men.

Now the Sergeant, with more womanliness and discernment than one would have thought any one could have shown in such a place, made no noise about it, but came in to see what miracle had happened. He saw the lad sitting there upon his bed with his coarse face full of despair, and he did not in the least understand what could have happened. The eyes of the lad were as full of wonder and of terror and of hopelessness as though he had seen some full tragedy of human life. The Sergeant shrugged his shoulders and let him be, and to save his being worried sent him off upon an easy job until he should come round. Then taking another man to saddle the two horses and to accompany him, he went off upon his usual round towards the hills, upon some official errand or other which he had managed to secure. But when he got there he found in the village, without leave, and having run and panted through the newly ploughed fields, this Belgian fellow, looking like an angry dog, sullen, and with new tears in his eyes, standing outside the door of the hovel.

He ordered him back; he rode his horse after him as the Belgian obeyed, and began trudging suddenly away, and said that he would not report it, but that it was a piece of madness, and that if that sort of thing went on it ended in Africa.

The Belgian said nothing, but plodded off, his enormous strength apparent in every step; and apparent also in the set of his neck and shoulders, and the bending of his head, something of doom. When he got back to quarters he got a ball cartridge from the workroom--no one knows how--he put it in one of the gunner's carbines, which he took from the rack--he had never handled such a weapon before--pulled off the boot from his sockless right foot, put the barrel of the thing in his mouth, and with his toe pressed down the trigger. In this way he killed himself.

I have told the thing exactly as it happened. Then many of the young men first knew that our lives are not wholly of our own ordering, or, to put it better, learned that to ride one's destiny needs in the soul of a man a training, a quickness and a constancy like that which, in the body, helps a man to ride a strong horse and to control him.

THE HUNGRY STUDENT

It was with great astonishment combined with a sense of misfortune that I discovered the other day in a garret off the King's road in Chelsea a poor hack formerly of my acquaintance, who in his endeavour to keep body and soul together had formerly been distinguished or rather ridiculous among journalists by his excursions into every conceivable subject and his preparedness to write any sort of books that a publisher might order of him.

When I found him after these many years he was lying in the last stages of some disease the name of which I forget but which anyhow was mortal; and it was the character in the disease which most affected him--to its scientific appellation he was indifferent.

He confessed to me that he had long had it on his conscience that in a work of his now long forgotten he had promised the reader to tell a certain story, and that this promise had never been fulfilled.

"It is in the beginning of the book," he whispered feebly as his dying eyes were turned towards the four chimneys of the electrical works, "that I promised to tell the story--nay, two stories; I promised to tell the story of The Hungry Student, and also the story of the Brigand of Radicofani. Both these stories weigh heavily upon my conscience. I have promised," he continued in a nervous manner which was tragically affecting, "and I have not redeemed my promise. Readers of mine may have died, still wondering what the truth may be. I beg you, therefore, to take this manuscript" (and he motioned with his wasted hand to some sheets of paper by the side of his bed) "and to give it to the world. At once," he said with the haste and fever of a dying man, "to-morrow you shall come and I will give you the second manuscript concerning the Brigand of Radicofani." ("Both," he moaned, "I took from the writings of others.") "And then I can die in peace."

I took the manuscript and left him, and to fulfil his last wishes I publish it here.

* * * * * *

A student in the University of Paris had the misfortune to be wholly deprived of money in any form, and such credit as he had once enjoyed was also entirely exhausted. It was now thirty-six hours since he had eaten any memorable meal, and during that long period of time he had tasted no more than one roasted potato, a pennyworth of chestnuts, a cup of coffee, and a little bread which he had kept in his pocket from the day before yesterday, and which was therefore of a hard and ungracious sort. Even that had been consumed in the small hours of the morning, and he sat upon a stone bench in the evening of the day about fifty yards from the Odéon Theatre, carefully considering what course he should pursue, and determining, if it were necessary, to thieve; for hunger had got him where hunger gets us all--which is not, as too many assert, in the stomach, but in the throat and palate and brain.

As he there sat he thought of delicious things; not of a mere filling, but of rare matters. He had longings. He remembered that beans, green beans, are better crisp than soft; and he thought of irrecoverable aubergines, and of what an onion was when it was well fried, and of larded chickens, and of great Touranian pears, and of the kind of wine called Chinon; he thought of all these things. But there is this quality about hunger, that the imagination does not satisfy it in any degree at all, but stimulates it only, and he was tortured as he sat upon that bench. Remember that he had not any money at all. He even recalled as he there sat the excellent taste of fresh bread and chocolate, and he was about to get up and walk off the memory of such things when a confused and growing rumour coming up the steep street round the corner broke upon him. It was the noise of many young men. It was almost military in its character, though it had no precision, for one felt in it the advance of numbers. It swelled with every moment, and at last there swung round the corner and up towards his bench a considerable body of students who were walking rapidly, excitedly, and happily, gesticulating freely and telling each other good news, while a very powerful and loud-voiced young man led them on. He could hear snatches of what was said by this company. One was crying: "It is surely the best cooking in the world!" Another, "I care nothing for the cooking, but what wine!" Two others were eagerly disputing whether the lark or the thrush were the better bird, and one was hoping that there would be a chaudfroid of nightingales. Some few sang songs, others in a sort of contented silence went forward eagerly; all evidently had before them some great goal.

As the Herd swept by him a lean young man with black hair just stooped in passing the Hungry Student and whispered: "Would you like to eat to-night?" He whispered back "Yes." "Then," said the first, whose eyes burned like coals, "up you get and follow, and hold your tongue until you learn the tricks of the rest."

So the Hungry Student rose up at once and went forward, mingling with the rest; and still their robust leader plunged through the streets before them like a captain bringing on a young army of saviours into an oppressed land. Now and then this captain would turn round and walk backward like a bandmaster or a drum major, shouting out good news of food to come and of the wine that has been pressed in Paradise.

So they went until they came to the Boulevard, which they crossed, one of them fighting with a policeman on the way. The band plunged into the narrower streets, and came at last to a little open square where was a restaurant with a balcony upon the first floor, and upon that balcony an awning. The name written above the restaurant was this: "The Widow Bertrand--a house founded in 1837." They all trooped in.

Upon the balcony a table was spread; there were other tables in the room with which the balcony communicated. At these some few and rather diffident guests had sat down; but the large table was reserved for the Herd. They took their places noisily, and falling upon a few little sardines and one or two stale strips of sausage they began loudly exclaiming upon every side at the excellence of the fare.

The Hungry Student said nothing, though he wondered much, but seizing an enormous piece of bread he ate it all up with the rapidity of a storm, and heard round him as he did so ceaseless exclamations of enthusiastic surprise. The wine was very thin and sour--but the wine of students is always so. What astonished him was to see a curly-headed fellow, very Northern in type, suddenly jump up and shout, so that all the street below could hear--

"Upon my word this is amazing! Send for Gaston!"

Gaston, a very weary waiter, came.

"Gaston," said the Northerner, "I really must know where the Widow gets this wine!"

The whole chorus of them shouted together: "Yes, Gaston, you must tell us where she gets this wine!"

Gaston murmured something which the Hungry Student did not hear.

"Oh, do not be afraid," shouted the Northerner, "we will not give the secret away. But what wine!" he added, turning round to his companions, who applauded with their hands. "We will get it through the Widow. She shall provide it to us. A wine like this is not to be missed." And he took the miserable stuff and sipped it slowly from his glass, cocking one eye up wisely towards the ceiling like a knowing fellow.

There followed bad soup, bad fish, bad meat, bad vegetables, and bad roast. But the Hungry Student was not particular, and he fed. Lord! how heartily he fed! He fed so heartily that he got into that mood when a man thinks he will never be hungry again. He ate great quantities of cheese, which alone of all the courses was served them with some liberality. He drank their coffee, and the whole host rose to go. He was still in a profound mystery.

An elderly woman, whose face betrayed keen avarice overspread with conventional courtesy, bade them good-night as they left her establishment. They cheered her, and the leader of the band kissed her warmly upon both cheeks. Then they went out, turned into the Rue Cujas, and quite suddenly their enthusiasm wholly disappeared, and a council of war was summoned. The powerful man, the leader, stood in their midst, gave the recommendation and took counsel with his peers.

"It is the last time!" he said grimly.

"Do you mean," said the dark-haired student who had first whispered to the Hungry Student as he passed, before the meal, "do you mean the Widow will not receive us again?"

"You are right," said the leader, in a solemn tone. "The bargain was for five nights; she has extended it to six. But it seems"--bitterly--"that we have done our work too well. There is no need of a seventh. Only yesterday the business was bought by a very foolish fellow from Auxerre."

"That," said a short fat young man, who had not yet spoken, "accounts for the intolerable wine."

The leader shrugged his shoulders, and said gloomily: "Friend, it was the same old wine, but from the bottom of the barrel."

"Then there is no meal for to-morrow," said a fourth man, anxiously, a red-headed, vague-eyed man who had gone in for Anarchism the year before, but was at that particular moment a Symbolist.

"Well," said the leader, "there is a meal for to-morrow. But the conditions are a little hard."

"Where is it to be? What is the rendezvous? What are those conditions?" cried several voices.

The strong leader obtained silence, and said: "I can tell you at once; Berteaux wants to sell his place by private treaty next week, and he will take us from to-morrow."

"For how many days?" broke in a silent man who had not yet spoken.

"A full week," said the leader.

"Well, that's good enough," said the dark man sullenly.

"Yes, but the point is," said the leader, "there is another offer: the new railway station wants to start a meal at a fixed price."

"It will be better cooking," said the red-haired Symbolist doubtfully.

"You are right," answered the leader, a little wearily, "but it is one of their conditions that one should eat at the absurd hour of half-past five, and hurry through the meal exclaiming all the while chance things about the express to Toulouse, and noting the rapidity of the service."

"I will never do that!" said the red-headed man firmly, amid murmurs of approval. "If I must eat their deathly stuff I will eat it, but I will not be hurried into the bargain; and half-past five is the hour for poisons, not for food. Absinthe is mine."

"No, Berteaux is the man," said the leader with a sigh. He put it to the vote, as is the fashion with the French. There was a large majority for Berteaux.

Next day that same enthusiastic whirl of youth went through other streets of the learned centre of Europe, their lips vivacious, their eyes aflame, to give Berteaux's business a selling value, and themselves to have food for nothing.

In this way was the Hungry Student filled.

* * * * * *

Next day, having sent in this manuscript that you have read, I called upon my poor friend to receive the Brigand of Radicofani; but you may imagine how shocked I was to hear that he was dead.

THE BRIGAND OF RADICOFANI

It is with the utmost pleasure that I am able to communicate to the English-speaking world a literary document of capital importance which my readers had only too great reason to mourn as lost. It will be remembered that my poor friend the Hack, recently deceased in the neighbourhood of the King's road, suffered in his last hours from the fear that the world might never receive his two masterpieces which he had so long promised them, "The Story of the Hungry Student" and "The Brigand of Radicofani." It will also be remembered that on reaching his humble lodgings after the publication of the first, I discovered him to be dead, and feared, therefore, that the second of these two classics would never be discovered. I am delighted to say that a Rag and Bottle Merchant and Dealer in Kitchen Stuff near The World's End (which is a landmark in that neighbourhood) has been found in possession of the precious paper, which by a providential accident is still legible, although it had been used to wrap up two boot-brushes and a second-hand pot of blacking. Such coincidences are not unknown in the history of English Letters.

* * * * * *

A young Colonial journalist, full of a great determination to succeed in life, but insufficiently equipped for that ambition, had occasion to visit the country north of Rome in the year 1903. He had been sent by his proprietors to gather information upon the customs of the peasantry for a series of articles which they designed to publish; he had orders to photograph these natives with or without their leave, and to acquire such a knowledge of the local dialects as would permit him to converse with them.