LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 THE EYE-WITNESS
 
 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 BY 
 * 
 
 H. BELLOC 
 
 BEING A SERIES OF DESCRIPTIONS 
 AND SKETCHES IN WHICH IT IS 
 ATTEMPTED TO REPRODUCE CER- 
 TAIN INCIDENTS AND PERIODS IN 
 HISTORY, AS FROM THE TESTIMONY 
 OF A PERSON PRESENT AT EACH 
 
 [The greater part of the sketches in this book 
 are reprinted from the Morning' Post, to the 
 Proprietor and Editor of which paper the 
 author owes his thanks for the permission to 
 reproduce them ftere.] 
 
 LONDON 
 EVELEIGH NASH 
 
 FAWSIDE HOUSE 
 1908
 
 TO 
 LORD LUCAS
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IN the sketches of \\hich this book is composed, 
 the author has attempted, upon the model 
 of one vivid experience, to reconstruct certain 
 passages of the past. 
 
 In each he has accumulated as well as he could 
 such evidence for detail as would make an actual 
 presentment of history rather than an aid to its 
 realisation. The hours, the colours, the landscape, 
 the weather, the language, are, as far as his learning 
 permitted, the hours, the colours, the landscape, 
 the weather, the language of the times and places 
 he describes. 
 
 The reader will of course distinguish between 
 those episodes in which the actors and events 
 are purely imaginary (as, for example, in " The 
 Christian ") ; those in which some part only of the 
 actors are real (as in " The Familiar ") ; and those 
 in which every detail of person and of scene is 
 rigidly historical (as in " Drouet's Ride " or 
 " The Ark-Royall "). 
 
 vu
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 In all of these, from the purely imaginative to 
 the purely historical, whatever the author could 
 verify has been verified ; but he well knows the 
 impossibility of arriving at a complete accuracy 
 where such minute details are attempted. 
 
 He has desired in these pages to present suc- 
 cessive pictures stretching across the 2000 years of 
 Christian history ; in so doing he has been com- 
 pelled to restrict himself to places with which he 
 was himself familiarly acquainted and to authorities 
 which he had the power to consult. Thus the 
 crossing of the Channel by sail under a light wind 
 (as in " The Two Soldiers ") he can claim to know 
 from experience. He has visited the arena in 
 Southern Tunisia which is the scene of " The 
 Christian," and the coast of the Narbonese which 
 is that of " The Pagans." He is familiar with the 
 banks of the Itchen on which " The Saxon School " 
 was built ; and the voyage of the Greek traveller 
 whose progress is imagined in " The Barbarians " 
 took place in his own county. He has sailed, as 
 did " The Danish Boat," from the North Sea over 
 the bar of the Three Rivers up Breydon, and so to 
 Norwich, and before the same wind. He has often 
 walked through the thickets in the valley of the 
 Brede, where the soldiers came in " The Night 
 after Hastings." Like all the world he knows the
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 Roman road to Staines, which is the road to 
 " Runnymede " ; the way up from the Weald, 
 through Combe on to Mount Harry, and the aspect 
 of "Lewes" from that height is familiar to him, as 
 is also the approach from the Vale of Glynde : as 
 for the flying buttresses of Westminster (which 
 appear in " The End of Henry IV.") he knows them 
 well. The Madrid of ' ' The Familiar ' ' he has visited 
 in just such a blinding summer ; and in those 
 shoals between Calais and Dunkirk, where " The 
 Ark-Roy air' watched the Armada, he has dropped 
 a little anchor more than once for a few hours. 
 He has passed from the Lakes to the Hudson where 
 was the tragedy of " Saratoga ; " he has paced the 
 ranges upon the field where " The Guns at Valmy " 
 were unlimbered ; and he has gone upon his feet 
 over the "Guadarrama" by that same road which 
 Napoleon took with his indomitable but half- 
 mutinous army : men who further followed him 
 some six thousand miles. 
 
 This long list is only permitted to occupy the 
 space it does in order to assure the reader that 
 the writer has not presumed to set down fancy 
 descriptions of landscapes and of climates which 
 he did not know. 
 
 As to historical references, I must beg the 
 indulgence of the critic, but I believe I have not
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 positively asserted an error nor failed to set down a 
 considerable number of minute but entertaining 
 truths. 
 
 Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a 
 regiment in " The Two Soldiers ") did sail under 
 Csesar for Britain from Boulogne, and from no 
 other port. There was in those days a great land- 
 locked harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to 
 the Narrows, as the readers of the " Gaule Ro- 
 maine " must know. The moon was at her last 
 quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden 
 by clouds is but fancy). There was a high hill 
 just at the place where she would have been 
 setting that night you may see it to-day. The 
 Roman soldiers were recruited from the Teutonic 
 and the Celtic portions of Gaul; of the latter 
 many did know of that grotto under Chartres 
 which is among the chief historical interests 
 of Europe. The tide was, as I have said, on the 
 flow at midnight and so forth. 
 
 Similarly, the men who followed the Queen of 
 France's tumbril in the Revolution were the 
 slouching guard I have described in " Mr. Barr's 
 Annoyance " ; and that scratching of the pens, that 
 sight of Carnot at full length upon the floor over 
 the maps, which I have put into " Thermidor," 
 is true to the evidence we have, as is the furniture
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 of that great room in which Europe was trans- 
 formed. 
 
 There is another category of description con- 
 tained in this book. Apart from detail ascertainable 
 by research it has been necessary, for work of this 
 description, to decide upon doubtful points, where 
 evidence is conflicting and where room for doubt 
 exists. Thus so great an authority as Chuquet 
 places the blowing up of the limbers at Valmy 
 after the Duke of Brunswick's abortive charge and 
 probably in the afternoon : I have followed what 
 seems to me the plain conclusion from Kellermann. 
 Similarly, there is no direct evidence as to the exact 
 spot in the pass where the disaster of Roncesvalles 
 took place we only know that it was on the 
 northern side of the range : my guess at the place, 
 though drawn from a close observation, is but an 
 opinion. There are many such direct assertions (in- 
 separable from the form of narrative) where strict 
 history would state the thing tentatively, admit 
 argument and defend a conclusion by reference 
 and appendix ; but none, I think, for which I have 
 not evidence or analogy, nor one which I have not 
 adopted myself only after a close reading of others' 
 views. 
 
 I must not further extend this apology for a
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 chance series of historical essays ; it may, however, 
 be of interest to the reader to know that the 
 scene from " The Barricade " has been described 
 to the author by men still living, who fought and 
 were wounded there ; while the scene drawn from 
 our English party politics in " The Politician " was 
 carefully studied upon the platform so recently as 
 the year 1906. 
 
 KING'S LAND, 
 1908.
 
 SYNOPSIS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK ...... 1 
 
 THE Two SOLDIERS (August 26, B.C. 55) . . .13 
 
 Upon August 26, B.C. 55, Julius Cajsar sailed from 
 Boulogne with two legions for the Invasion of Britain 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN (179 A.D.) 25 
 
 In the year 173 A.D. the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 
 among the worst of the enemies of the Faith, still lived. 
 The town of Thyrsus in the Province of Africa (now El 
 Djem in Tunis) was the most important of the great 
 towns near the Desert. It has disappeared. A Christian 
 is here supposed suffering martyrdom 
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER (About 370 A.D.) ... 37 
 
 At the end of the fourth century, about 370 A.D., 
 England was highly populated. The official language 
 was Latin ; the large garrisons were those of a Roman 
 army. The Catholic Faith was officially accepted, 
 though many of the governing class rejected or smiled at 
 it. This wealthy province (of which East Anglia was one 
 of the wealthiest and most populous parts) was annoyed 
 by incursions of petty barbarian tribes from the north, 
 east and west, eager to enjoy the advantage of a high 
 civilisation. None of these incursions were more irritating 
 than the descent of small pirate boats under the north- 
 east winds of spring from the savage countries beyond 
 the North Sea 
 
 xiii
 
 xiv SYNOPSIS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PAGANS (About 420 A.D.) 49 
 
 Certain old families maintained a Pagan loyalty long 
 after the Empire was officially Christian. The Narbonese, 
 where this scene is laid, was a very wealthy and highly 
 Komanised part of Gaul. From this part sprang the 
 family of Charlemagne, whose ancestors were of the kind 
 here described. The name "Port of Venus" has been 
 preserved in " Port-Vendres " 
 
 THE BARBARIANS (About 700 A.D.) 6l 
 
 In the latter part of the fifth century (towards 500 A.D.) the 
 civilised parts of Western Europe were finally overrun by 
 uncivilised or half-civilised tribes from beyond the 
 frontiers of the Roman Empire. Their numbers were not 
 great, but the disturbance sufficed to upset the balance of 
 social order, and everything decayed. No part suffered 
 more than Britain, where savages from Scotland and 
 uncouth pirates from the North Sea joined with half- 
 subdued tribes in the province itself to pillage and ruin 
 society. For over a hundred years the anarchy was such 
 that Britain disappears from history. Some few of the 
 great towns were not only sacked but actually destroyed, 
 and among these appears to have been Anderida, a 
 garrison and port upon the site of Pevensey in Sussex. 
 In the second half of the sixth century (a hundred years 
 later) there was something of a reaction after all this 
 anarchy : the Roman armies reorganised Africa, and the 
 Roman religion and civilisation re-entered Britain with 
 St. Augustine. Some parts, however, were neglected, and 
 none more than the Sussex seaboard, which did not get 
 back the Mass and the Latin Order till a hundred years 
 after Kent and London. 
 
 I here suppose a Greek from Constantinople or New Rome, 
 which was the seat of Empire and highly civilised, visiting 
 Sussex just after the first feeble re-establishment of the 
 Roman religion there. He goes down the Stane Street 
 from London to Chichester, and then, with letters from
 
 SYNOPSIS xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 the Bishop of Selsey, he goes along the sea-plain to the 
 mouth of the Ouse, where he takes a boat round Beachy 
 Head to Pevensey 
 
 RoNCESVALLES (778 A.D.) 73 
 
 The Mohammedans having conquered Spain, Charlemagne, 
 the greatest member of the greatest of Gallic Christian 
 families, could do no more than contain them by holding 
 the valley of the Ebro, as upon another frontier he con- 
 trolled the enemies of Europe by holding the valley of the 
 Elbe. Keturning to Gaul by way of the Eoman Road and 
 pass (the Imus Pyrenseus) from a campaign in the Spanish 
 March, his rear-guard under Eoland was overwhelmed by 
 the mountaineers in the midst of the Pyrenees. This 
 disaster gave rise to the noblest of Christian epics 
 
 THE DANISH BOAT (About 780 A.D.) .... 83 
 
 Hardly was Europe creeping back to civilisation when, in 
 the eighth century, a furious assault upon it, far worse 
 than any earlier attack, broke from every side. Scandi- 
 navian and Pagan Germans, the Mohammedans, and later 
 roving bands of Mongols attempted to destroy it. The 
 energy of the Gaulish and German ruling family, which 
 culminated in Charlemagne, checked the disaster, but 
 after Charlemagne's death it was renewed more fiercely 
 than ever, and Europe was barely saved by the resistance 
 of Alfred and the Count of Paris more than a hundred 
 years after the first attack. The Faith was the particular 
 object of this invasion of "Roman Land," whether by 
 Arabs and Moors as in Spain, or by Scandinavian pirates 
 as in Britain. In what follows I presume one of the first 
 raids 
 
 THE SAXON SCHOOL (The Summer of 1002) . . 95 
 
 Winchester was the centre of Saxon England : Hyde, the 
 great Abbey outside the gates, was to Winchester what 
 Westminster was later to London, In what follows a 
 
 6
 
 xvi SYNOPSIS 
 
 PACE 
 
 school in the neighbourhood, and attached to the Abbey, 
 is imagined, just before the last Danish conquest and 
 harrying of that valley 
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTINGS (October 14, 1066) . 103 
 
 On October 14, 1066, a great body of men from all parts of 
 Europe, a few of them Italian, many Breton, but most of 
 them French, led by William the Duke of Normandy, who 
 claimed Edward the Confessor's inheritance, defeated, 
 upon a hillside called " Hastings Plain " above the river 
 Brede, the less civilised supporters of Harold, who, under 
 that provincial noble, had marched at full speed from 
 Yorkshire to meet the invaders. The contest was not 
 determined till very late in the day, and while there was 
 no regular pursuit, the cutting off of laggards and the 
 attempt to prevent the information and reorganisation of 
 the enemy could only be pursued after sunset 
 
 RUNNYMEDE (June 15, 1215) 113 
 
 On June 15, 1215, the League of Officials, wealthy merchants, 
 higher clergy and Barons met the King, John (against 
 whom they had risen after the defeat of his foreign policy), 
 on the far side of the Thames, opposite Staines, having 
 marched that morning from London. He there assented 
 to a Great Charter, confirming their privileges, which 
 they had drawn up for him to sign. John, after signing, 
 took the field, hammered the rebels, and would, but for an 
 untimely death, have easily recovered the rights of the 
 central government against the aristocracy 
 
 THE ARMIES BEFORE LEWES (May 13, 1264) . .125 
 
 John's son, King Henry III., a man of great piety, dis- 
 turbed by yet another rebellion of his Barons and the 
 wealthy of London, after certain successes came down to 
 the Cinque Ports and so up over Cuckmere from the east 
 to Lewes with his army in early May 1264. The Barons' 
 army and their allies from London lay at Fletching in
 
 SYNOPSIS xvii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 the Weald of Sussex to the north of Lewes and of the Downs, 
 under the guidance of Simon de Montfort, a mystic, son 
 of that great French noble who, a generation before, had 
 destroyed the Albigensian Heretics. On May 12, this rebel 
 army received the challenge of the king and on the 13th it 
 broke camp and approached the escarpment of the Downs, 
 in order to reach Lewes, where the King's army lay 
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES (May 14, 1264) . . .135 
 
 On May 14, 1264, Simon de Montfort, Ms rebel Barons 
 and their allies from London, though losing the left of 
 their battle on the Downs above Lewes, were successful 
 upon their right and so gained the day : taking prisoner 
 the king himself. In this way the nobles and the wealthy 
 of London, who had already partially succeeded against 
 John and had obtained from him the signing of Magna 
 Charta, laid a foundation for what was much later to 
 become the aristocratic constitution of England 
 
 CRESSY (August 26, J 346) 147 
 
 Upon August 26, 1346, Edward III., retreating with some 
 twenty-five thousand men or less upon the sea after a 
 successful raid in Northern France, was caught up by the 
 French king, in pursuit, at Cressy (the French Crecy), in 
 Ponthieu. He beat off this host, quite four times his own 
 in number, with complete success 
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV. (March 19, 141 3) . . 159 
 
 On March 19 (or 20), 1413, Henry IV., who had usurped 
 the crown by treason from his cousin Richard fourteen 
 years before, died in the Abbot's Chamber at Westminster. 
 He was prematurely aged, affected with a horrible disease 
 and suffering from epileptic fits, the last of which seized 
 him as he prayed, on March 19, at King Edward's shrine 
 in the Abbey. In his time and just before it, the division 
 between poor and rich had been violent ; religious vision- 
 aries had accentuated this feeling and mixed it with 
 Messianic, Apocalyptical and Mystical solutions of social
 
 xviii SYNOPSIS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 problems. Also in his time and thence onward the official 
 suppression of philosophical discussion became habitual. 
 In one contemporary account sailors boasted that his body, 
 on its way to funeral, had been thrown overboard 
 
 THE FAMILIAR (May 1588) 169 
 
 In the second week of May 1588, the fleet of transports 
 (the Armada) which was to sail from Spain and to carry 
 troops from the Netherlands to invade England, lay ready 
 in the Tagus. In what follows is imagined a scene in the 
 Koyal Palace at Madrid where council is held as to the 
 date of sailing 
 
 THE "ARK- ROYALL" (July 27, 1588) . . .181 
 The Ark-Royall was, during the struggle with the Armada, 
 the flag-ship of the English Lord Admiral, a landsman, 
 one of the Howards, a family recently grown very powerful 
 through wealth taken from the Church 
 
 THE APPRENTICE (January 30, l6'49). . . .191 
 
 Charles I. was executed on this day upon a scaffold outside 
 the second window on the north of Whitehall Banqueting 
 Hall, at four in the afternoon 
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS (December 10, 1688) . 201 
 
 The kings of England had held by legitimate descent, or 
 on the plea of it, from the Conquest to the close of 1688, 
 when the landed and rich merchant classes, relying on the 
 strong religious support of London and upon the unpopu- 
 larity of the king in the West, called in a foreign army 
 and transferred the crown from James II., the last legiti- 
 mate king, to his daughter and her husband. The prime 
 act of James's fall was to send away his wife and child, 
 himself following 
 
 SARATOGA (October 6, 1777) 213 
 
 General Burgoyue, in progress to cut the American Rebel- 
 lion in two by a march from the St. Lawrence to the sea,
 
 SYNOPSIS xix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 was successful in all the first part of his campaign. His 
 gross dilatoriness in effecting the short portage between 
 the lakes and the Hudson gave the enemy time to con- 
 centrate upon that river. He was hemmed in on the 
 heights of Saratoga ; discovered, in a reconnaissance upon 
 October 6 (here described) that he could not retreat, 
 and on the 16th surrendered ; the French were thus led 
 to support the rebels, who obtained their independence 
 within six years 
 
 DROUET'S RIDE (June 21, 1791) . . . .223 
 Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, King and Queen of 
 France, attempting to fly from Paris in the midst of the 
 Revolution, were intercepted, just as they reached safety, 
 by one Drouet, who galloped near midnight by a short 
 cut through the forest to the town of Varennes and 
 roused the populace 
 
 THE GUNS AT VALMY (September 21, 1792) . . 233 
 
 The allied Prussian and Austrian armies, advancing with- 
 out difficulty against a French force of little military 
 value, easily turned its position, and were within striking 
 distance of Paris, there to put an end to the Revolution. 
 When, in turning to destroy the French force left behind 
 them after the turning movement, they met with a check, 
 due to rapid French artillery fire from the plateau of 
 Valmy. This slight interference with the elaborate 
 Prussian plans threw such confusion into the allied 
 armies as soon necessitated a retreat, which changed the 
 history of the world 
 
 MR. BARK'S ANNOYANCE (October 16, 1793) . . 243 
 
 Marie Antoinette, formerly Queen of France, was executed 
 just after midday on October 16, 1793. Negotiations for 
 the import of American grain into France (then suffering 
 from war and famine) were being conducted by the Revo- 
 lutionary Government. An American agent is here sup- 
 posed suffering an adventure on that day
 
 xx SYNOPSIS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 GORNAY (June 1794) 265 
 
 Among the prisoners executed at the end of the Terror 
 was a young cavalryman, Gornay, whose name was not 
 upon the list of the condemned, though it was upon that 
 of the imprisoned. It is not known how the error was 
 committed, uor why its victim did not protest 
 
 THERMIDOR (July 1794) ...:.. 267 
 
 A committee of the Kevolutionary Parliament was chosen 
 in the worst crisis of the war with Europe to be Dictator 
 and to administer martial law. Robespierre, the idol of 
 the moment, was nominally a member, but his love of 
 popularity interfered with the desire of each of the others 
 to make his own department (War, Finance, &c.) work- 
 manlike. He came more and more rarely, at last only to 
 ask for favours for protdgte, and finally the committee 
 was determined to be rid of him and he fell from power 
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE GUADARRAMA (December 22-23, 279 
 1808) 
 
 Napoleon in Madrid, believing the English army with Sir 
 John Moore to be at Valladolid, and rightly judging that 
 they must retreat at full speed to the sea through Astorga, 
 determined to cut them off by forced marches, the first of 
 which was undertaken three days before Christmas 1808, 
 and is here described. He failed to intercept the English 
 retreat because his information was erroneous. Sir John 
 Moore, as a fact, was at Sahagun, and instead of having to 
 march two miles to Sir John's one, which he could easily 
 achieve, success demanded four, an impossibility 
 
 THE BARRICADE (May 1871) 291 
 
 The last three days of the suppression of the Commune 
 consisted in charges of the Regulars against the barricades 
 of the Communists, and among the last of these to be 
 captured were those upon the slopes of Montinartre, a high 
 isolated hill upon the extreme north of Paris overlooking 
 the whole city
 
 SYNOPSIS xxi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE POLITICIAN (January 11, 1906) .... 301 
 
 On the fifth of December 1905 Mr. Balfour's Administra- 
 tion, which had carried to a successful and prosperous 
 conclusion the South African war and had admitted the 
 Boer Kepublics into our Imperial System, went to the 
 country. During the general election following many 
 meetings were held, and among them this, in a northern 
 town, upon the llth of January, 1906
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK 
 
 rilHIS story that follows was told in the White 
 Horse at Storrington, a small town of the 
 Weald. 
 
 Three men were talking. First they had talked 
 of the Education Bill, and from that they had come 
 to the General Election, and from that to discussing 
 whether men were happier under one system of 
 government than under another, and from that to 
 the power of the mind to the all-power of the 
 mind and from that to the Reality of Experience. 
 All these things were discussed in the White Horse 
 at Storrington ; when one of the men said : " I will 
 tell you something that happened to me once." 
 
 He thought a little while, and then added : " It 
 happened three Thursdays ago." And at once, 
 without giving the others time to collect them- 
 selves, he plunged in rapidly thus : 
 
 " You will remember how hot it was three 
 3
 
 4 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 Thursdays ago. I was walking with my ashplant 
 from Thakeham here, and when I came to the 
 little dense wood near Roundabout I was so 
 oppressed by the weather that I thought I would 
 sleep. So I went into the wood and lay a little 
 while with my head on my hand looking at the 
 deep purple clouds, which were full of thunder, in 
 the west, and then in a little while I went to sleep. 
 It Was about three o'clock in the afternoon. 
 
 " You know that there is a phase between 
 sleeping and waking when the mind is very con- 
 scious, not only of its own existence but also of 
 every physical impression (for instance, it is acutely 
 sensible to noise), but during which one does not 
 choose to move, and during which, to any one who 
 saw one, one would seem to be still fast asleep. 
 I had come suddenly out of my sleep into this 
 condition when I appreciated that I was not lying 
 still. There was a regular swing beneath me by 
 which my head was now much higher than my 
 feet, and again dropped back almost, but not quite, 
 to a level with them. I had for some minutes 
 (they may have been seconds) no curiosity on 
 this, for I had quite forgotten where I was, until a
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK 5 
 
 slight nausea took me. It was not grave, for I am 
 used to the sea, but it was enough to disturb me. 
 At the same time, as I spread out my right hand 
 uneasily, though I had not yet opened my eyes, I 
 felt a damp roughness under my fingers. I threw 
 out my other hand lazily ; it came upon cold iron ; 
 then I opened my eyes wide and at the same 
 instant I felt a sharp breeze on my face and with 
 it the touch of spray. 
 
 " I had opened my eyes at a moment in the 
 swinging which I have described when my body 
 was nearly level. I could see, as I lay, nothing 
 but blue sky, very blue sky and clear, with a wind 
 going over it and one or two driven clouds which 
 were quite white. It was coldish weather. At 
 once, as the downward swing came and my head 
 was lifted, I saw a vivid belt of brown and white 
 sea running before the tail end of a gale, and in 
 the same glimpse, though for some reason I could 
 hardly move my head, I saw that around me was a 
 ship's deck and that a ship's bulwarks stood within 
 a yard of my feet. I could also see an edging of 
 sacks upon either side of me, and, moving one 
 hand slightly, I felt beneath my head a hugger-
 
 6 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 mugger of rope ; all the while I could smell and feel 
 the damp and the salt with which my clothes were 
 scattered. 
 
 " The swinging was regular. I had seen that 
 belt of sea for the third time, and had been thus 
 staring for just the space in which a hulk will roll, 
 recover, and roll again in the trough of the sea, 
 when I heard a loud explosion somewhat behind 
 me and on my right, and with it the deck upon 
 which I was trembled, and one could hear the 
 rumbling of heavy little wheels. Two men, whom 
 I could not see, cried out together in French, but 
 it was French with an accent that I have never 
 heard, and some one from far off replied to them 
 or commanded them in a totally different tongue, 
 which sounded to me a little like Welsh, only 
 sadder. I must tell you that this gunshot was 
 fired as we heeled over towards the horizon, and 
 when the deck on which I lay came back again 
 more level and showed the freeboard of the hulk 
 well above the water, then came that running of 
 little heavy wheels which must have meant that 
 they were hauling back a twelve -pounder to reload. 
 Meanwhile, beyond all these clear and neighbour-
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK 7 
 
 ing sounds was a loud and confused jumble of 
 cries, commands and running naked feet, the 
 whole merged into the noise made by the sea as it 
 banged against us right abeam : for there seemed 
 to be no way on the ship. 
 
 " You may imagine how hard I tried to turn my 
 head, for the whole thing was as fresh and new 
 and strange to me as a thing could possibly be, 
 but as I tried to do so I felt so acute a pain in the 
 movement of my neck, that I dropped my chin 
 again into its original and cramped position upon 
 my chest. As I did so I felt the unmistakable 
 smart, the slight relief of tension and at the same 
 time the warm trickle upon the skin which mean 
 that one has opened a wound, and so truly was I 
 living in that new life that I remember thinking to 
 myself : ' Curse it ! I have opened that wound 
 again ! ' 
 
 " Behind me the gun fired again, and this time 
 with a slight change of aim, for the ricochet struck 
 within my vision, topping a big, bursting wave 
 about four hundred yards off, and immediately 
 after I could see, closer by, the advance of a 
 ship.
 
 8 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 " Two of her masts were standing, the third was 
 shot away, but her rigging was little damaged, 
 and there were but few shot-holes in her close 
 canvas. In spite of the loss of her mizzen she 
 leaned pretty heavily to the wind, and since her 
 mainsail was, of course, gone, she carried the 
 English colours from a makeshift of a signal halyard 
 on the main. One would have said as she advanced 
 into the belt of sea (which I caught sight of with 
 every roll) that she was a transfigured vessel, for 
 her sails were not dingy but full of glory from the 
 setting sun, whose colours I now saw for the first 
 time reflected upon her canvas. She had not 
 come Well abreast of us when she bore away a 
 little, and immediately I saw flashes here and 
 there, both from her deck and from the upper line 
 of ports beneath it. Her lower ports were closed. 
 
 " I dare say that on her log she called it a broad- 
 side, but I am here to testify, if ever her name is 
 known, that she was wounded for all her finery, 
 for the broadside was very disjointed. Anyhow, 
 just as the smoke rose and half hid her lower 
 rigging, but before the gale had blown it away, I 
 heard two heavy thuds, one of which was followed
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK 9 
 
 by the slow bending inward and then the crashing 
 down of a portion of the bulwark at my feet. 
 The edge of a panel came upon my leg, but it came 
 slowly and did not hurt me ; moreover the weight 
 of it was supported by an iron stanchion upon 
 which it fell. 
 
 " There was little reply from our side. There 
 came a good deal of shouting from behind me, and 
 from what I judged to be, by the motion of the 
 ship, the forward part, but no gun was fired, and 
 one could hear no distinct command. A few 
 of those naked feet ran up the decks not far from 
 my head. I could hear their steps upon the wet 
 planking, and I could feel the vibration of the 
 wood. 
 
 " The vessel before us, which had come a little 
 into the wind, went off again, and I knew that 
 she was preparing for another piece of combined 
 fire. It came, and as I waited for its effect, there 
 seemed to come a report infinitely louder, all around 
 me as it were, taking up the whole air and darkening 
 it, and shocking me into an instant vitality which 
 was at the same time a complete confusion. I 
 thought in a sort of way of my wound and forced
 
 10 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 myself half upright, but as I did so, still quite blind, 
 or, as it seemed to me, in an impenetrable darkness, 
 I knew that I had torn it again. Where there 
 had before been a trickle I now felt a rush of blood, 
 and that awful Weakness and loss of self which 
 comes from a sudden spending of blood fell upon 
 me. 
 
 " I opened my eyes with the glance which men 
 give as they despair, and I again saw clearly the 
 branches of trees, the thunder-clouds, and the 
 hot sky of Sussex. 
 
 " For a little while I still felt the weakness which 
 was, perhaps, only the weakness of my sleep. It 
 passed away, I got up and walked and came into 
 this town. 
 
 " What do you make of that experience ? " 
 
 When he had asked this question he continued 
 silent for a little while, and he got no answer. He 
 added : "It was as real as any reality that I have 
 known . . ." 
 
 His face, as he spoke, and his accent were the 
 face and accent of a man remembering something 
 recent, detailed and clear ; and surely what had 
 happened to him was this, that time had overlapped
 
 MOTIVE OF THIS BOOK 11 
 
 on him ... he had been on board the Jacobin 
 just at the end of the fighting on June 1, 1794. 
 
 Hearing such a tale I wondered whether it might 
 not be possible, by an effort of the will as by an 
 accident, to live for some moments in the past 
 and to see the things that had been, stand and 
 live before one. In such an attempt and from 
 such an occasion I began to write the passages 
 which are now collected in this book.
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 
 
 AUGUST 26, B.C. 55 
 
 Upon August 26, B.C. 55, Julius Ocesar sailed from 
 Boulogne with two legions for the invasion of Britain
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 
 
 AUGUST 26, B.C. 55 
 
 FT1HE night was very warm in Picardy, for August 
 was not yet done, and the heated air of the 
 day still quivered over the bare stubble of the 
 hillsides upon either side of the great landlocked 
 harbour, when that famous regiment, the Tenth, the 
 greatest of the Roman Legions, stood formed along 
 the quay ; along that quay lay for a mile and 
 more, all the way from Pont-de-Briques northwards, 
 a great mass of transports with their gangways 
 fixed and everything ready for going aboard. The 
 waning quarter-moon shone fully upon the ranks 
 of men, but she was already red and near the 
 horizon, soon to set beyond that main hill to the 
 west which hid the sea. It was not yet midnight. 
 As the men stood at ease in the ranks talking to 
 each other in low tones, a non-commissioned officer 
 came rapidly down the water front, glancing with 
 quick eyes to note, where the lanterns shone on 
 them, the numbers of the companies ; for these 
 were marked in rough white figures upon little 
 
 15
 
 16 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 boards which stood in the ground. Then when he 
 found the one he wanted he approached his com- 
 rade in command and communicated an order. 
 That comrade turned and called out in Latin two 
 names, whereat two men, certainly not Roman, 
 and men whose true names were very different 
 from their regimental sound, stepped out quickly 
 and stood together. They were the artificers of 
 their section, and were drafted for the catapults 
 upon the faster ships, the galleys that lay towards 
 the mouth of the harbour. The one man, who 
 was short, very broad-shouldered, bullet -headed, 
 vivacious and young, had for his name Kerdoc ; 
 the other, who was tall, softer in the flesh, with 
 heavy limbs, and pale, rather uncertain blue 
 eyes, was called Chlothar ; the first was from the 
 Beauce, from the edge of that plain, half a day's 
 march or more beyond Chartres and the upper 
 waters of the Eure, the second from the eastern 
 slopes of the Vosges, where a cosy little wooden 
 village had nourished his boyhood, high upon the 
 mountain side from whence could be seen far off 
 the forests of the Allmen. 
 
 Many other artificers so selected were drafted 
 in until a column of perhaps a hundred had been 
 formed, then they marched them up the long 
 wharf of wooden piles, got them aboard the first
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 17 
 
 fast galley, bade them ship the gangway, and at 
 last left them free as the sailors ; some of them 
 cast off, some of them ran to stand at the halyards. 
 
 The moon had set when all these preparations 
 were accomplished, but the air Was still very warm, 
 the stars showed but thinly through the summer 
 haze ; from the south-west right up the valley of 
 the harbour towards the sea blew a faint but steady 
 breeze. The galleys weighed, and with very gentle 
 and rhythmical strokes of the oars they dropped in 
 file down the sluggish ebb of the neap tide till they 
 came to the narrow mouth of this great port of 
 Icht and took the open sea. 
 
 Kerdoc and Chlothar, the elder and the younger, 
 the short man and the tall, the dark man and the 
 fair, leant over the bulwark of the weather side 
 and watched, with some fear but with a great 
 exhilaration, this new element the sea. 
 
 Slight as the wind Was, there was not a little 
 jump upon the bar of the Liane, and each of them 
 had a qualm of sickness, but very soon, when they 
 were well out of the narrows, the galley was put 
 before the wind and the steady run of the vessel 
 eased them. All that they heard and saw filled 
 them with life : the new noise of the water along- 
 side, the creaking of the cordage, the high sing- 
 song cries of the sailors when an order was given 
 
 B
 
 18 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 to haul, and the even beat of the oars ; as also, 
 above them, an infinite expanse of sky; before 
 them, as it seemed, an infinite expanse of water 
 in the dusk of the night. In one place they could 
 see over their shoulders the indistinct mass of 
 Grisnez rising above the coast and blotting out 
 the few horizon stars ; upon all the rest of the ring 
 around them, from the extreme south-west to the 
 east, there was nothing but a hazy line where the 
 dark sea mingled with the night sky. Very soon 
 the motion of the ship seemed to change, the sea 
 grew easier, though the wind was steady, and the 
 bows took the water with a longer sweep, because 
 the tide had turned and was now running slowly 
 eastward up the Straits. In an hour it began to be 
 light. 
 
 First, the little seas showed fresh and grey under 
 the beginnings of dawn, then colours slowly grew 
 both upon the water and upon the ships around ; 
 at last could be made out like a picture the whole 
 sweep of the Gallic shore, for they had gone but 
 few miles under the light air and against the ebb 
 during the last hours of darkness. 
 
 With the flood tide, however, and the breeze 
 still holding they made more rapidly out toward 
 mid-Channel, and when the sun sprang up above 
 the eastern edge of the world they could clearly see
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 19 
 
 before them the new shore which they had hitherto 
 but dimly perceived on specially clear days from 
 the heights of the camp above Boulogne. It was a 
 long, low line of dirty white, as yet miles and miles 
 away, and sinking at either end into a flat that did 
 not show above the sea. With the exhilaration 
 of the daylight the conversation of the two men 
 grew animated and full. They conversed in the 
 Pidgin Latin of the regiment, the one with the 
 sharp hammered accents and thin vowels of the 
 Gaul, the other with the slurred gutturals of the 
 German. 
 
 And first they talked of the miseries and mis- 
 fortune of the service, and agreed upon their bad 
 luck that they should have been picked out of 
 their regiment (a hard enough service, God knows !) 
 to herd with common barbarians, who were not 
 soldiers but mechanics, for each had (though it 
 was not the form of the army to show it) a swelling 
 pride in the Tenth ; and, indeed, it was a famous 
 regiment, and destined to an astonishing destiny 
 for when all of those then serving should be dead, 
 eighty-seven years later and more, the Tenth were 
 to garrison Jerusalem and to furnish the guard on 
 Calvary. 
 
 Next, then, as the morning grew and the sun 
 of August rose, throwing long shadows of ships
 
 20 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 athwart the sea, they talked of the danger of such 
 voyages ; talking bombastically like landsmen, and 
 thinking that in this calm night they had passed 
 through perils. 
 
 " But I cannot drown," said Kerdoc wisely, 
 wagging his head. " I have a charm against water, 
 and I cannot die by it ! " 
 
 " Show me your charm," said Chlothar, a little 
 sulkily, for he was jealous of so much power. 
 
 Kerdoc hesitated somewhat ; it was a great 
 confidence ; then he remembered how long Chlo- 
 thar and he had marched side by side nearly a 
 year altogether and he furtively pulled a little 
 bronze medal from his neck, where it hung by a 
 chain, and showed it in the palm of his hand to his 
 comrade. There was a crescent moon stamped 
 upon it, with a star on either tip, and in the curve 
 of the crescent the face of a goddess. 
 
 Chlothar looked at it with horror. He thrust 
 out the fore and little fingers of his right hand, 
 clenching the others, and put his hand out over the 
 sea, making the sign of the Horned God who pro- 
 tected him from the influence of the Moon ; then 
 he said in a slow, but angry, manner : " Put it 
 away ; I will not look at a figure of the Moon. 
 He is evil ! " 
 
 Kerdoc was stung in his quick nature by the
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 21 
 
 insult, but proud in his vanity at the effect and 
 power of his charm ; his vanity conquered, and 
 he said with somewhat ridiculous swagger : " The 
 priests gave it me ; or rather," he added slyly, 
 " they gave it me as against a rich offering. I got 
 it in the Grotto where they sacrifice to the Virgin 
 who shall bear a Son." 
 
 The German knew that famous place, and could 
 not avoid an expression of respect. Kerdoc quickly 
 took advantage of that mood to exalt himself. 
 
 " That Grotto," he said, " is within the limits 
 of my tribe ; my mother had a cousin who was 
 priest there underground." 
 
 Chlothar said nothing, but looked sullen for 
 some time, and then said brutally : " Time may 
 come and the army will do hurt in your village ! " 
 It was a common taunt in the regiment against all 
 newly enlisted men, and Kerdoc let it pass by, 
 but he was still sore when he remembered the 
 gesture the German had made to his Goddess, and 
 for some time there was silence between them, 
 and both men looked over the side. 
 
 They were now, however, close under the British 
 shore, and the activity of the men about them, 
 sailors shifting ropes, tautening sheets, or running 
 forward with bare feet to execute a command, 
 showed them that change had come upon their
 
 22 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 journey. The wind had dropped, a long smooth 
 swell had taken the place of the small choppy 
 waves, the water was already slack and just upon 
 the ebb again, when to one command which the 
 trumpets sounded down the line of galleys the 
 anchors were dropped and the boats swung round 
 east and west, head to stream, all in rank under 
 the chalk walls of Britain. 
 
 Upon the skyline along the edge of the cliffs, 
 hiding the burnt summer turf with their multitude, 
 were thousands upon thousands of the islanders. 
 
 They kept but a little order ; at every few yards 
 among the mass a taller figure showed upon the 
 platform of a chariot, the whole host was moving 
 and seething like a column of ants, and even at 
 that distance could be heard from time to time 
 over the carrying surface of the water a whirl of 
 distant cheers, or more clearly the braying of 
 short conchs blown loudly and discordantly in 
 random defiance. Now and again some one of 
 them would hurl his spear over the edge of the 
 cliff till it fell upon the chalk at the base, or, by 
 some exceptional feat, just passed the tide-line of 
 the sea, and caught the surf where the swell of the 
 high tide broke against the shore. 
 
 All this the two soldiers of the Tenth watched 
 curiously. Chlothar said : " I wonder how they
 
 THE TWO SOLDIERS 23 
 
 come on ! " To him, as to all private soldiers, 
 the indolent prospect of approaching action (how- 
 ever insignificant the action promised to be) was 
 unpleasing. 
 
 Kerdoc assumed a different mood. " I can 
 tell you," he said, affecting an experience which 
 his youth did not possess, "they are Gwentish 
 men; I have heard them called Gwentish men. 
 Now men of the Gwent fight by rushes, and are 
 easily broken. We have some such to the north of 
 us at home. They cannot break a line ; it is all 
 looks and shouting. My father has fought against 
 Gwentish men," he added apologetically, seeing a 
 look of bovine doubt in Chlothar's eye, and recog- 
 nising that his criticism of the fighting had been 
 vague ; " I do not say that I have, but my father 
 has. Sometimes the men of our village would 
 fight them in a band, and sometimes two by two 
 for a prize." 
 
 ***** 
 
 The sun rose to his meridian and declined, the fleet 
 still lay upon the oily sea under the heat at anchor, 
 when toward mid-afternoon the breeze rose again, 
 and as it rose the galleys slowly swung round, 
 bringing their sterns from west to east as the tide 
 returned. With that moment was perceived, after 
 so many hours, the group of the heavy transports
 
 24 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 bowling up from the south-west with the wind 
 and the sea together, but of the cavalry that should 
 have appeared to the left of that fleet in the little 
 ships from Ambleteuse there was not a sign. 
 
 A pinnace set out from a central galley to meet 
 the newcomers with orders, and on the deck of 
 that galley stood the great awning of Tyrian cloth 
 which covered Caesar.
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 179 A.D. 
 
 In the year 179 A.D. the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 
 among the worst of the enemies of the Faith, still lived. 
 The town of Thyrsus in the Province of Africa (now El 
 Djem in Tunis) was the most important of the great 
 towns near the Desert. It has disappeared
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 17.9 A.D. 
 
 IN the year 179 of our salvation, but 933 of the 
 Foundation of the City, there came in from 
 the bare and burnt countryside into the town of 
 Thyrsus, in the province of Africa, a young man, 
 fat, wealthy and good-natured, bearing the absurd 
 name of Psyttyx. He had on a beautiful white 
 cloak, caught up on his shoulder by a brooch made 
 of a large amethyst, and engraved with magical 
 signs. Round the edge of this cloak was a narrow 
 purple band. There walked by his side in a 
 familiar manner an aged slave, dressed in an 
 expensive way, and wearing those boots which the 
 Gauls had made fashionable in Rome itself, but 
 which only a foolish vanity would make a man 
 wear on the edge of the Sahara. 
 
 The old slave grumbled as he went, but this did 
 not disturb the smiling face of the fat youth, 
 who seemed contented with the world in general ; 
 and in particular with his present business, which 
 was to meet at a tavern just within the gates of 
 
 27
 
 28 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 the city certain gladiators who were the next 
 day to fight in the arena. 
 
 He and his slave passed through the gate, where 
 there was a jostling of every kind of man, Scandi- 
 navian mercenaries, a dull German Centurion of 
 the Guard, negroes and Nomads from the sands ; 
 he turned at once on the left to the little tavern 
 and was greeted by the innkeeper, whom he 
 greeted in return. Seated at a wooden table were 
 a dozen men, among whom a huge Illyrian was 
 prominent with his brutal, happy face, and next 
 him a small agile Greek with a black pointed 
 beard and restless eyes. There also was a long- 
 jawed Iberian with very short hair and a cruel 
 solemnity of face, and a Syrian who looked so soft 
 one might have thought him a moneylender but 
 on three occasions he had killed his man, for he 
 was very dexterous with the curved sword, and 
 would fight with no other. Separate from these 
 and sitting quite a yard apart from them was a 
 person of a very different sort. One could tell him 
 at once for a freedman. He was awkward in his 
 gestures and nervous and shy. He also was eating 
 and drinking as the others, but apologetically, as 
 it were, with his cup half full and playing with his 
 plate. This man was a Christian. He was of no 
 great size of body, and seemed even more ill-chosen
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 29 
 
 than the Syrian for the fight that was to be held 
 on the morrow. 
 
 Psyttyx, as he sat down among them all, gazed 
 curiously on this figure, for, like all men whose 
 wealth lias permitted them education and travel, 
 he was not offended but interested by exceptional 
 beings. They raised their cups in salutation to 
 Psyttyx, and he, when he had called for wine and 
 water, raised his, saluting them in return. But he 
 could not keep his eyes from wandering perpetually 
 towards the stranger, though his business was with 
 the others, several of whom he maintained at his 
 own expense, and upon all of whom he had made 
 bets, one way or the other ; upon the Illyrian in 
 particular he had a book which gave odds on for 
 his survival the next day, and evens that he would 
 not be wounded ; a foolish bet, for this big man 
 was somewhat clumsy. 
 
 The Illyrian greeted him most noisily, like a 
 sort of brother, the Greek most courteously; the 
 Syrian alone betrayed an obsequious manner 
 distasteful to our Western idea, but one already 
 gaining upon the Roman world when a poor 
 man spoke to a rich one. The others nodded 
 or murmured his name. The Christian alone 
 sat silent. 
 
 " Well now, Psyttyx," said the Illyrian in a
 
 30 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 coarse accent, " here you are up to time, bringing 
 Geta with you, and your absurd name as well." 
 He laughed loudly at this, but the others looked 
 a little frightened. 
 
 "It is a good name," said Psyttyx, " and 
 African ; and you well know that I do not put in 
 a fiddle-faddle of cognomens, as is too much the 
 custom. Now your name no one knows, and did 
 he know it, he could not pronounce so barbarous a 
 tangle." The laugh was against the Illyrian. 
 Then Psyttyx turned, for he had a soft heart, to 
 the silent stranger and said : " Will you not drink 
 with me ? " 
 
 " They won't let him drink," sneered the Syrian, 
 " he is a Christian ; their priests forbid them 
 this." 
 
 " Oh no," said the Christian eagerly ; " that is a 
 heresy, I assure you ! It is a heresy in special 
 of the bishopric of Ephesus and has been con- 
 demned." 
 
 " What on earth is all this ? " said Psyttyx, 
 greatly puzzled and beginning to be amused. 
 
 The Christian, seeing that he had made himself 
 ridiculous, was silent and blushed. 
 
 " They sent him here," said the Illyrian. " He 
 did not come of his own accord." 
 
 " Is that so ? " said Psyttyx.
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 31 
 
 The Christian, gulping down a weak sob, nodded 
 his head. 
 
 " Was it a penalty ? " said Psyttyx, leaning 
 forward. 
 
 The Christian shook his head negatively and 
 said in a voice just above a whisper : " No ; it 
 was an arrangement." 
 
 " He made a magical sign," said the Illyrian 
 with another guffaw, " and they offered him his 
 chance in the arena, and he had the sense to take 
 it. Make that sign again now," he added, leaning 
 forward and looking down the table at the nervous 
 little man, " we Won't blab." They all looked 
 curiously at the stranger, but he only shook his 
 head again like a man who fears to make a fool of 
 himself, and who wishes that he were elsewhere. 
 
 " If you like," said Psyttyx, quite seriously, " I 
 will speak to the magistrates." But the Christian, 
 with an imploring look in his eyes, forbade him. 
 In his heart of hearts he hoped things might go well 
 with him, and he knew that a man who had victory 
 in the arena pleased the populace of the town, 
 and would be more or less immune for the future. 
 
 " I thank you heartily," he said in his low voice, 
 and speaking to Psyttyx alone, as though the 
 others were not present, " but I will not risk 
 imprisonment and the loss of the Holy Mysteries."
 
 82 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 " What mysteries are those ? " said the Greek, 
 vastly interested at once at the mention of the 
 word. 
 
 The Christian shook his head again. " We may 
 not mention them," he said. " But," and here an 
 exalted look came into his eyes, " they give us 
 power over life and death, so that we call ourselves 
 the Sons of God." 
 
 "It is this damned secrecy of theirs," growled 
 the Illyrian, " which puts people's backs up ! No 
 wonder they get badgered ! " 
 
 " Nonsense," said the Greek shortly, " you must 
 have secrecy if you have mysteries. I have been 
 initiated into three myself," he said with no little 
 pride, " and you," he said, turning to the Syrian, 
 " have you not some such society out East ? " The 
 Syrian gave a greasy smile, shrugged his round 
 shoulders and said : " Oh, yes ; but only as a 
 matter of form." 
 
 "So you are always saying," said Psyttyx 
 shortly, " but it is my idea that you Levantines 
 have cast a sort of net over the Empire with your 
 filthy leagues." Then turning to the Christian 
 he said : " Do come with me now into the Square. 
 We will buy a bunch of flowers and put them on 
 the statue of the Divine Emperor. I will do it, 
 but you will be with me, and it will be publicly
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 33 
 
 noticed, and you will go free." The Christian 
 shook his head again and two great tears came 
 nto his eyes. 
 
 " There you are again," said the old slave, who 
 had not yet spoken. " ' Divine Emperor ! ' Just 
 because you think it gentlemanly with its Army 
 tone ! But your father hates the trick and it is 
 my duty to tell you so." Psyttyx was a good deal 
 annoyed and said: "All right, 'the Emperor/ 
 then, if you like." 
 
 " He is a good fellow is the Emperor," said the 
 Illyrian, and they all murmured assent; then he 
 added thoughtfully, " but a fool." 
 
 "And he rides badly," put in the Greek; "I 
 have seen him." Then he turned to the Christian 
 and abruptly said : " What do you mean by 
 ' power over life and death ' ? Do you mean a 
 magic that will protect you against death ? " 
 
 The silent man shook his head again. 
 
 " Well, if you can't do that, what on earth is the 
 good of your mysteries ? " said the Innkeeper, 
 who Was getting interested. 
 
 " Tell me," said the Greek, " and do speak out, 
 what do these mysteries tell you of death ? " 
 
 " I do not know exactly," said the Christian 
 tentatively, " for I am still learning and am not 
 admitted to the full mystery, but when the Lector 
 
 c
 
 84 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 sings out the two words (which are ' audemus 
 dicer e '), I have to go out into the Narthex, for I 
 may not hear the Pater Noster" They could not 
 restrain their laughter at these uncouth and mean- 
 ingless words. 
 
 " I know what the Christians believe," said the 
 Illyrian loudly (for he was getting drunk). " My 
 aunt that kept a little shop at Solano married 
 one for her second husband, and a plaguey time 
 she had of it. He was given to drink, and he 
 never did a stroke of work." 
 
 " The Christians," said the Innkeeper senten 
 tiously, " worship a God, called Chrestos, at mid 
 night ; they use the magical sign of the Egyptian 
 Tau, and prostrate themselves before i-n image of a 
 woman standing upon the moon. It is well known 
 that they sometimes immolate children." He 
 said this looking at the Christian with some dis- 
 favour, and in the pompous tone of one who has 
 met every kind of man, and who has reserved his 
 wisdom to the end of the conversation. 
 
 " Oh rubbish ! " said Psyttyx, " the sooner 
 you get these vulgar ideas out of your head the 
 better. Christians are just as other men, with a 
 little masonry like any of ours." They wrangled 
 somewhat, and as they wrangled the Christian 
 looked profoundly miserable, and said several
 
 THE CHRISTIAN 35 
 
 times, " I do assure you, gentlemen .... I do 
 assure you ! " Then Psyttyx, who disliked a 
 quarrel, rose, and was prepared to go out, but not 
 before he had asked his own two (which were the 
 Illyrian and the Greek) what money they might 
 need for their expenses before the fight next day. 
 They said they would leave it to him, and he gave 
 them four gold pieces out of a purse his slave 
 carried, for he thought it dishonourable to carry 
 coin upon his person. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Next day at about ten o'clock in the morning, 
 upon the shady side of the amphitheatre, where 
 the wealthier men had reserved a few seats from the 
 public, Psyttyx watched some twenty gladiators 
 going into the arena, from which the horses and 
 animals of a sham hunting scene had just been 
 driven. The slaves ran out and scattered clean 
 sand, and the fight began in couples. 
 
 One brace there was which could hardly be said 
 to fight, for the lots had pitted, one against the 
 other, the poor Christian and a little, low-built, 
 broad-shouldered man from Auvergne of the sort 
 that can tame an animal in a day, hard as wood, 
 and perfectly unfeeling. Upon these two, with a 
 sudden movement of pity, Psyttyx riveted his 
 eyes.
 
 36 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 The Christian, with his knees weakly bent, 
 shuffling and awkwardly parrying, backed away 
 from the first strokes of his opponent, and, amid 
 the shouts and laughter of the audience, crouched 
 against the wall above which the wealthier spec- 
 tators sat. They leant forward to see the end 
 of the farce. Above Psyttyx's shoulder the 
 wealthiest Jew of Thyrsus leant with an unpleasant 
 familiarity, his old mouth grinning thinly, and on 
 every side they abused and insulted the wretch 
 who made so poor a show for his life. He had no 
 knowledge at all of how to handle the short sword. 
 He waved it desperately before the Auvergnat, 
 who, smiling slightly and quite at his ease, was 
 choosing where he should strike. He struck just 
 where the neck joins the shoulder, and the Christian 
 went down, his bent knees giving way at once, 
 his hands for one moment supporting the weight of 
 his body, which in another moment had sunk upon 
 the sand as a gush of blood sickened him and spent 
 out the strength of his soul. In that attitude, 
 attempting to lift his head, in spite of the severed 
 muscles, he began the Sign of the Cross. Just 
 before he had completed it, in the mere second 
 which it takes to perform, his final exhaustion 
 was upon him ; he groped at his left shoulder, 
 then his hand fell, and he was dead
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 
 
 ABOUT 370 A.D. 
 
 At the end of the fourth century, about 370, England was 
 highly populated, the, official language was Latin, the large 
 garrisons were those of a Roman army. The Catholic Faith 
 was officially accepted, though many of the governing class 
 rejected or smiled at it. This wealthy province (of which East 
 Anglia was one of the wealthiest and most populous parts) 
 was annoyed by incursions of petty barbarian tribes from 
 the north, east and west, eager to enjoy the advantages of a high, 
 civilisation. None of those incursions were more irritating 
 than the descent of small pirate boats under the north-east 
 winds of spring from the savage countries beyond the North 
 Sea
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 
 
 ABOUT 370 A.D. 
 
 UPON the bank of a Suffolk river, not two 
 miles from the sea, there was a large 
 Roman house, already tamed by age. 
 
 It had been large in its origin, two centuries 
 before ; it was larger now. One could trace its 
 first form in the rigid lines of the old tiles ; a big 
 quadrangle with two wings. 
 
 To these had been added by six generations 
 of men innumerable things. Sheds had decayed 
 and had been partly renewed ; here there was a 
 pretty gate, quite new, and more in the scheme of 
 the whole ; there statues in the false taste of an 
 earlier time were set too formally along a central 
 avenue ; while all around a mass of roofs, of every 
 colour and age, showed how the place had spread. 
 
 It was the spring of the year ; a sound, cold 
 wind blew off the North Sea, and March was not 
 yet ended. It was long since Julian had died, and, 
 in a fashion, the new order had been heard of here. 
 There was a pride in the memory of Constantine, 
 
 39
 
 40 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 much official talk of the Church, but no missioner 
 had come to the place, even before the persecution, 
 and as to those who had abandoned the gods, the 
 gods so abandoned were not so much the gods of 
 the cities as the gods of the woods. Half the 
 gentry of the cities still worshipped Mithras, but in 
 the squares of wild land between the great roads 
 first one tribe, then another, had followed its 
 chief and had taken on the new Rites of Immor- 
 tality and all the mysteries of Christ. Such things 
 appealed to them, and their legends were already 
 mixed with the story of the Lord. The sacra- 
 ments they already knew. 
 
 But into this great house had come nothing of 
 these things. It was the house of a General Officer, 
 to whom had been confided, from his father's 
 time, and perhaps from further back still, the 
 government of one shore. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 I could not to-day describe that shore, so much 
 have Time and the sea destroyed it ; at least I could 
 not describe it by our known coast-line. But I 
 may put it thus : that this noble's writ and juris- 
 diction ran from the beginning of the great wall 
 that bounds the Wash, onward and southward 
 down Norfolk till one came to the mouth of the 
 Three Rivers. Here was a broad estuary very
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 41 
 
 free from storms and guarded at the entry by two 
 forts ; it is Breydon Water now. Then, on south- 
 ward, a line of low cliffs ran where now everything 
 is covered by the sea, until at last one came to 
 a good river-harbour, where, for centuries later, 
 during the silting up of the gravel and the sand, 
 men continued to talk of the " old town," the 
 " Aid-borough " and that is its name to-day. 
 
 In the valley of that stream, and, as I have said, 
 two miles from the noise of the sea, was built the 
 villa. 
 
 Upon that March day and evening there was 
 very little to disturb the home. The ploughing 
 was long over by nightfall. 
 
 The roads were safe. The fields all about them 
 were too populous and too well garnered to affect 
 the fears of any. 
 
 Sacrifice had been offered (for the day demanded 
 it), and things were ready in the darkening house 
 and in the quarter of the slaves for the last songs 
 and for sleep. 
 
 At their table the master of the place and his 
 sons ate together ; their women with them. The 
 wind had fallen with the sun. The pipes beneath 
 the floor so warmed their room that the air of a 
 British March entered pleasantly through the 
 small round windows, moving the curtains but
 
 42 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 slightly, and blowing but now and then upon the 
 wicks that floated in their melted tallow ; for oil 
 was too dear for burning. 
 
 One of the young men half complained, and 
 said that no man could live without oil : he quoted 
 Greek to the purpose. 
 
 His brother, older and more used to the North 
 (for the younger had spent all his boyhood in Gaul), 
 quoted another line from the same divine Poet, 
 to the purpose that wine also was necessary to 
 man. 
 
 " But wine we have ! " said the younger. 
 
 " Yes ! " said the older, smiling. " But no 
 oil ! " 
 
 Their father told the one that he knew nothing 
 of the frontiers yet, the older that he was not used 
 to them. 
 
 The women talked of old news, and were Weary 
 to hear any mention of these wilds. The rude 
 tesselated patterns of the floor at their feet and 
 the rough textures offended them. 
 
 Much more were they disgusted at the clumsy 
 slaves, some dark, some red, all uncouth, 
 Christian and local, that attempted to serve the 
 board. The women would perpetually have re- 
 buked them but that the master of the house 
 forbade all complaint, believing his power on this
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 48 
 
 edge of a mysterious sea to depend upon nothing 
 less than violence. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Their ill meal was ended. The women had gone 
 to their rooms. The laughter of a local game, 
 soldiers' Latin and German and British dialects all 
 mixed, came from the slaves' buildings ; off half 
 a mile to seaward the small square barracks sent a 
 faint echo ; when, gradually, over the cloudy and 
 driven sky spread a glare that was not seen at first 
 within the curtains of the little room, where the 
 commander and his two sons still sat at bad wine 
 and slow converse. A gust blew up the curtain 
 of an arch. The eye of the old soldier saw that 
 light at once. He rose and said : " They have 
 lit the Beacon ! " 
 
 His elder son rose with him, annoyed, but saying 
 nothing. 
 
 His younger son openly complained. 
 
 "It is the third time, " he cried, " since I am 
 back from Gaul that you have come to nothing 
 with such signals ! " 
 
 His father Was already in the stables and giving 
 orders for the saddling before his words were done. 
 
 The two lads followed. Two little horses were 
 ready for them also, and they must needs mount : 
 it was orders. The one was a garrison horse, an
 
 44 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 " Emperor's horse " as the regimental joke went, 
 bred by the State, vicious and old : the other was a 
 finicky African thing that the younger son had 
 won at a bet in the circus of Rheims, and had 
 brought home for extravagance : he would not 
 ride another. He spent his time as he mounted 
 and rode out of the stable yard cursing this 
 sham " duty." 
 
 On ahead rode his father with one slave. 
 
 When, in a little while, they had come to the 
 barracks, and the General Officer had found the little 
 force under light arms, and with them a brown 
 centurion not a gentleman, ready, but a little 
 alarmed the General Officer asked news. He 
 could hear no other news than that the Beacon 
 was alight which he knew. The posts were 
 stretched for miles along the shore. " Has there 
 been news from Caistor ? " " Nothing, sir." 
 "Are the three next posts warned ? " " Yes, sir." 
 " How many all told ? " the centurion would 
 undertake no authority beyond his own. " Quite 
 enough to repel, sir." " Well, then," said the 
 man responsible for so much more, for the big 
 inland garrison, and for all the concentration of 
 that coast, " get forward. I will come behind 
 along the road." 
 
 The men marched out toward the glare of the
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 45 
 
 light along the paved way ; the General Officer 
 and his sons and his slave followed, riding. 
 
 The Beacon appeared enormous as they neared 
 it. 
 
 It glared 50 ft. above them on its spire of beams 
 in its open basket of iron, and its light showed the 
 tumbling waste of the bar, and white horses for 
 some half-mile out to sea. No ship of the Pirates 
 appeared but one must recently have been seen 
 or the Beacon would not have been fired. 
 
 Very far off down the coast, toward the gap 
 where is now Orford Haven, another light had 
 begun to twinkle, and there was a nearer blaze on 
 the Onion. To the north the cliff of Southwold 
 shone. 
 
 The General Officer bade them bring the two 
 watchers of the Beacon, and when they came asked 
 them what they had seen. " Two ships, sir." "How 
 long ago ? " " One not a minute before you came, 
 the other long since." Even as they spoke one of 
 the men cries out with a German cry and pointed 
 to the sea. A long black line, very low, lifted 
 forward in a carved fantastic-headed dragon shape, 
 came into the blaze of the Beacon and tried the 
 bar. She answered badly ; the lumpy seas of 
 the bar caught her and buffeted her she veered 
 off ; but in that moment the Romans had seen in
 
 46 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 the ruddy light of the high fire above them ten 
 shields along her sides and the faces of strange 
 
 men. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 They waited all night; the Beacons glaring, 
 the men cursing the futility of such a guard, the 
 General Officer patient and silent ; sending but 
 two posts, one north, one south, to pass the news 
 along all the coast to the Wash one way and to 
 the Thames the other. 
 
 It was the very cold and sickly dawn of a late 
 day before they turned back home. As the light 
 broadened the space of the North Sea was all 
 before them and not a sail upon it. 
 
 The Pirates had departed. The General Officer 
 rode homeward with his sons. When they had 
 got to stables again and the yawning slaves had 
 unsaddled, the younger son said to the elder: 
 " What an affair ! " 
 
 His eyes were drawn and wrinkled under the 
 new day. 
 
 He looked dissipated from his one night of 
 soldiering. 
 
 The elder son answered : " Father must. There's 
 no promotion without it. Besides which, he 
 believes in it." 
 
 They went into the house and found their room.
 
 THE GENERAL OFFICER 47 
 
 "How many have you caught since last De- 
 cember year, when I left for Gaul ? " said the 
 younger as he turned to sleep. 
 
 " Well . . . one in a way." " How ' in a 
 way ' ? " " Well he got off, but we took his 
 landing-party two men ! " 
 
 The younger son laughed loudly, the elder less 
 loud, but he laughed. The next day the alarms 
 were over, and they took the road to the great 
 garrison town on the Colne for the games. There 
 were lions shown and one elephant, but he would 
 not fight
 
 THE PAGANS 
 
 ABOUT 420 A.D. 
 
 Certain old families maintained a Pagan loyalty long after 
 the Empire was officially Christian. The Narbonese, where 
 this scene is laid, was a very wealthy and hiyhly Romanised 
 part of Gaul. From this part sprang the family of Charle- 
 magne, whose ancestors were of the kind here described. The 
 name " Port of Venus " has been preserved in " Port- Vendres " 
 
 D
 
 THE PAGANS 
 
 ABOUT 420 A.D. 
 
 A CLEFT in those steep rocks which are the 
 last of the Pyrenean hills where they fall 
 into the Mediterranean was still called the Port 
 of Venus, although the high statue of the goddess, 
 which had stood upon the low marble quay above 
 the tideless water, was now since fifty years cast 
 down ; the fishermen could see it glimmering in 
 rare days upon the floor of the port below. 
 
 To the south of that haven, upon a level stretch 
 of easy shore, stood a house which had long har- 
 boured the chief owner of the fields about the 
 town. This house was wide-spreading and low ; 
 a great extent of red tiles on its flat roofs, sobered in 
 colour, made it look like a little city against the 
 intense blueness of the sea, and it was divided 
 everywhere into courts, both for the gentlemen and 
 for the slaves, and there was a court for guests 
 also for such as might come northward by the 
 road from Spain or southward from Narbo. The 
 house was all built of those small, thin bricks which 
 
 51
 
 52 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 the small Roman hand could raise with such 
 precision ; toward the sea low colonnades of 
 Grecian stone diversified a front the windows of 
 which were small arched windows lighting the 
 private rooms of that delightful dwelling. 
 
 Here great wealth, a strong tradition, and an 
 inherited tenacity of character had forbidden the 
 awful legend of the Roman State to fail. Here the 
 gods, of the city at least, still received a somewhat 
 weary and half -disdainful but punctilious worship ; 
 and here the Symbols of the Family, images which 
 had wandered centuries ago from Italy across the 
 sea, heard daily and nightly a passionate reverence 
 and unfailing prayers. But all around the great 
 life of the plain which the Canigou overlooks, 
 protects and unifies had opened first to the en- 
 thusiasm, later to the plain convention, of the 
 Faith : its ministers were everywhere the summit 
 of the village life, and the officials in their careful 
 and strict hierarchy bound up with their every act 
 an observance of Catholic ritual as a testimony 
 to their loyalty and to the presence, in spirit at 
 least, of the Sacred Palace. The Bishop also, 
 travelling in great pomp over this garden of the 
 Rousillon in the early autumn days, when every- 
 thing was garnered, but a great heat still hung over 
 the land, had brought him and his train the full
 
 THE PAGANS 53 
 
 majesty of that eternal society which very visibly 
 had changed, which none could conceive of as 
 ending, and in which the mind of every man, from 
 the Lothians to the Euphrates, reposed. The 
 Empire was Christian. 
 
 Within that great house which still maintained 
 the worship of serene though conquered deities, 
 three generations had watched the advent of new 
 things. In the first it might have seemed that 
 the quarrel lay even, and that this Oriental in- 
 fluence (which so many thought a dawn, but a few, 
 and those among the greatest, the complete decline 
 of human things) would retreat before the stead- 
 fast influence of the Roman forehead and of Roman 
 eyes. In the second generation it was apparent 
 that a great weariness had overcome the resist- 
 ance of all who still clung to the institutions of a 
 thousand years : they were at argument, or smiling 
 upon those around, or abandoning all things in the 
 common life except the theatre and the market, or 
 more commonly leaning to the official thing and 
 accepting the relief of speaking a common tongue 
 in a common worship with the peasantry and the 
 lords around. But still this household stood apart, 
 though now its lord of the third generation, already 
 old, saw very well that the Galilean had conquered* 
 
 He sat with his nephew, to whom caprice had
 
 54 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 given a barbarian name for such were fashionable 
 with the women and often given to their little 
 sons he sat with his nephew, a young soldier, 
 at evening under his colonnade and watched the 
 landscape for the approach of strangers. The 
 slaves of the vineyards were filing in from the fields, 
 laughing together, some saluting as they passed ; 
 the domestic slaves had begun the business of the 
 night ; the lamps were trimming, and from within, 
 where one of the small kitchens was, could be 
 heard the blowing of charcoal fires. And as the sky 
 darkened and the first stars just showed, a group 
 of horsemen were seen far off along the Spanish 
 road. 
 
 The nephew asked whether there were not some 
 news as to their habit, whether the officials of the 
 town were to meet them, and what rule should be 
 given as to the prayers and songs when the feast- 
 ing began. His uncle answered : 
 
 " The guests are not from the hills." He smiled 
 gently. " They are of generous blood, from 
 Gerona, and they will not marvel at anything 
 worthy of a Roman house. If any of the company 
 are disturbed they will be found among the retinue, 
 and they can go and sing their hymns among the 
 slaves." He still smiled as he added : " Nor will 
 the officials say anything ; and you, if you had
 
 THE PAGANS 55 
 
 lived here and were not so recently from the 
 Avernian Deserts, would feel no fear of the way in 
 which the evening shall pass." 
 
 The guests arrived and the slaves took their 
 horses. Upon the breasts of two men, one of whom 
 had the boots and some of the accoutrements of a 
 soldier, hung enamelled crosses. A third, with the 
 low brow and quiet eyes of the rank that governed 
 all that land, had round his dark young hair a 
 very small circle of gold ; he also betrayed religion 
 as he greeted the noble who was to entertain him, 
 for he gave him the salutation of Peace in the name 
 of the Lord. They entered in together, and the 
 old man, the master of the house, taller than the 
 rest and even more leisurely in his gait than they, 
 spoke of the Spanish road and of the vintage, of 
 the news from the North, and of what changes 
 had been ordered for the garrison along that shore. 
 
 When it was already dark over the sea, they 
 reclined together and ate the feast, crowned with 
 leaves in that old fashion which to several of the 
 younger men seemed an affectation of antique 
 things, but which all secretly enjoyed because 
 such customs had about them, as had the rare 
 statues and the mosaics and the very pattern of 
 the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth 
 and lineage. In great established wealth and
 
 56 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 lineage lay all that was left of strength to those old 
 gods which still stood gazing upon the change of 
 the world. 
 
 The songs that were sung and the chaunted 
 invocations had nothing in them but the memories 
 of Rome ; but the instruments and the dancers 
 were tolerated by that one guest who should most 
 have complained, and whose expression and apparel 
 and gorgeous ornament and a certain security of 
 station in his manner proved him the head of the 
 Christian Priests from Helena. When the music had 
 ceased and the night deepened, they talked all 
 together as though the world had but one general 
 opinion ; they talked with great courtesy of common 
 things. But from the slaves' quarters came the 
 unmistakable sing-song of the Christian vineyard 
 dance and hymn, which the labourers sang together 
 with rhythmic beating of hands and customary 
 cries, and through that din arose from time to time 
 the loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. 
 The master sent out word to them in secret to con- 
 duct their festival less noisily and with closed doors. 
 Upon the couches round the table where the 
 lords reclined together, more than one, especially 
 among the younger men, looked anxiously at their 
 host and at the Priest next to him, but they saw 
 nothing in their expressions but a continued
 
 THE PAGANS 57 
 
 courtesy ; and the talk still moved upon things 
 common to them all, and still avoided that deep 
 dissension which it was now useless to raise because 
 it would so soon be gone. 
 
 There came an hour when all but one ceased 
 suddenly from wine ; that one, who still continued 
 to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He knew the 
 reason of their abstention ; he had heard the 
 trumpet in the harbour that told the hour and 
 proclaimed the fast and vigil, and he felt, as all did, 
 that at last the figure and the presence of which 
 none would speak the figure and the presence of 
 the Faith had entered that room in spite of 
 its dignity and its high reserve. 
 
 For some little time, now talking of those great 
 poets who were a glory to them all, and whose 
 verse was quite removed from these newer things, 
 the old man still sipped his wine and looked 
 round at the others whose fast had thus begun. 
 He looked at them with an expression of severity 
 in which there was some challenge, but which was 
 far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so 
 looked the company gradually departed. 
 
 The Priest last rose. His host led him to the 
 porch with ceremony, summoning all those do- 
 mestics whose duty it was to stand present on 
 all occasions of official honour ; then he came back
 
 58 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and found his nephew alone. One lamp was 
 permitted to remain, and by its light the old man 
 questioned his sister's son, asking him whether 
 it was by courtesy or by fear or for what reason 
 that he also, at the sounding of the hour from the 
 harbour trumpet, had put aside his cup. 
 
 The young man was embarrassed and he blushed. 
 He swore that he had done nothing foolish, nor 
 even gone to their ceremonies in public, and most 
 emphatically did he assure the man from whom he 
 was to inherit everything that he had touched none 
 of their sacraments ; but one must do as others 
 did, and in the regiment it was not tolerable to 
 break with universal custom. His uncle did not 
 press him nor answer him at all ; he nodded and 
 he gently sighed ; then he led the way to a niche 
 where stood those rude family images, centuries 
 and centuries old. Together they paid the accus- 
 tomed worship, and then they also parted to sleep. 
 
 But the old man in the darkness of his little room, 
 through the open arch of which came the slight 
 noise of the sea against the wall below, lay sleepless 
 many hours, his head upon his hand, remembering 
 all that his great learning told him of the past and 
 of the greatness of the past, and accepting, as men 
 accept death, the end of all that had lent humanity 
 to his world. Then, as drowsiness came upon him,
 
 THE PAGANS 59 
 
 he murmured to himself the high verse which for 
 now so many hundred years had comforted the 
 Roman soul and given it dignity in the face of 
 dissolution. 
 
 Next morning, with the first light of day, the 
 Levanter rose. The sky was low and grey with 
 hurrying clouds, and an angry sea burst and 
 smoked against the walls of his room.
 
 THE BARBARIANS 
 
 ABOUT 700 A.D. 
 
 In the latter part of the fifth century (towards 500 A.D.) 
 the civilised parts of Western Europe were overrun by un- 
 civilised or half-civilised tribes from beyond the frontiers of the 
 Roman Empire. Their numbers were not great, but the dis- 
 turbance sufficed to upset the balance of social order and every- 
 thing decayed. No part suffered more than Britain, when the 
 savages from Scotland and uncouth pirates from the North 
 Sea joined with half-subdued tribes in the province itself 
 to pillage and ruin society. For over a hundred years the 
 anarchy was such that Britain disappears from history. 
 Some few of the great towns were not only sacked but actually 
 destroyed, and among these appears to have, been Anderida, a 
 garrison and port upon the site of Pevensey in Sussex. In 
 the second half of the sixth century (a hundred years later) there 
 was something of a reaction after all this anarchy : the Roman 
 armies reorganised Africa, and the Roman religion and civili- 
 sation re-entered Britain with St. Augustine. Some parts, 
 however, were neglected, and none more than the Siissex sea- 
 board, which did not get back the Mass and the Latin Order till 
 a hundred years after Kent and London. 
 
 I here suppose a Greek from Constantinople or New Rome, 
 which was then the seat of Empire and highly civilised, visiting 
 Sussex just after the first feeble re-establishment of the Roman 
 religion there. He goes down the Stane Street from London 
 to Chichester, and then, with letters from the Bishop of 
 Selsey, he goes along the sea-plain to the mouth of the Ouse, 
 where he takes a boat round Beachy Head to Pevensey
 
 THE BARBARIANS 
 
 ABOUT 700 A.D. 
 
 YOU know, Nicephorus, that there has existed 
 in our family a great curiosity with regard 
 to the letters of the Bishop, our ancestor, and 
 even much reverence for them. For when he 
 was appointed by the Divine Theodosius to the 
 See of Anderida he perpetually sent his notes and 
 his observations upon the farthest places of the 
 West to those members of his family who preserved 
 our archives ; and in this he did but follow the 
 example of the ancients, officers of the Palace, 
 generals, and even bishops like himself, whose 
 custom it was, as they changed their seat in the 
 Roman obedience, to write upon the climate and 
 the habits of the various provinces and tribes that 
 they might meet. 
 
 This he did, and what he sent has been piously 
 preserved ; but its meaning is tenfold greater to 
 me now that I have seen with my own eyes the 
 places of which he wrote, their present condition, 
 and the evidence both of the grandeur which he 
 
 63
 
 64 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 enjoyed and of the destruction which he did not 
 live to see. 
 
 You must know, then, that during the negotia- 
 tions (with which I was entrusted) between the 
 sacred Palace and the Bishop of Rome, I heard 
 from some about the Court of the Western 
 Patriarch, that one of those Missions in which 
 he too busily interests himself with the Pro- 
 vinces of the West was about to start for 
 Britain, and though (I tell you privately) such 
 assumption of authority was odious to me, yet 
 I was certain that the voyage proposed would 
 be at once useful for my own information and for 
 that of the Divine Emperor, who is ceaseless in 
 his vigilance over even the most remote districts of 
 the world. Nor did my consent to accompany the 
 Roman clergy and officials give offence, as I am 
 told, to the Sacred Palace itself, though it may 
 have roused the cackling of some of those tongues 
 that are always ready to defame an absent man ; 
 but my return will establish both the motive of my 
 journey and the value of the step I have taken. 
 
 I proceeded, therefore, in such company through 
 the Province and through the Gauls, hearing the 
 settlement of various disputes and observing the 
 manners both of the Romans and of the Barbarians, 
 until I came to that Bononia from which the
 
 THE BARBARIANS 65 
 
 Divine Caesar, though yet a Pagan, had first 
 sailed for the Island of Britain, and I was indeed 
 curious to learn as I approached the white coast 
 what I should find in this place, where it was said 
 that all arts were lost, and whence certainly but 
 little news has come to us for now two hundred 
 years. 
 
 Those who accompanied us upon the boats, or 
 rather some of them, were already familiar with 
 Britain, but so doubtful is the learning of the West 
 that they could not understand the eagerness with 
 which I was approaching the ruins of this province. 
 
 I will not delay you with any long description of 
 the halts we made at Canterbury and Rochester 
 and London, where are three new bishoprics, of 
 three cities all barbaric, but the last indeed the 
 least barbaric of the three, for in London one might 
 still believe, by certain of the statues and buildings 
 round one, and by the appearance of commerce in 
 the great river, that the better time had returned. 
 Nor will I weary you with any description whatever 
 of the Latin rites, of the use of Icons (even in the 
 smallest chapels) and of the certitude all these 
 people are in upon matters which we of New Rome 
 know to be over-full of dispute, but I will at once 
 proceed to tell you how I went south to visit those 
 shores with which the name of our family is con- 
 
 E
 
 66 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 nected. There are several excellent roads of a 
 military sort from London to the nearest shores of 
 the sea, and one especially which one would swear 
 had borne soldiers but yesterday, so perfect does 
 it still remain, though the damp climate of these 
 provinces (which lie under the shade of the northern 
 night and are at the very limit of the world) has 
 covered them with moss and lichen. The embank- 
 ment is very perfect, and even in the marshy 
 crossings of the rivers there has been no destruction 
 of the way worse than what may be seen in the less 
 fortunate parts of Italy itself. So in but two days 
 I reached the town of Regnum with letters provided 
 for me from Rome to the Bishop of that place. 
 
 As to the shape of this last it may be briefly told. 
 Its walls still surround it and the Palace yet stands 
 though in places blackened by fire. Some also of 
 the smaller houses preserve the order with which 
 we are familiar, but it would make you laugh to 
 see who inhabit such great relics and weep to 
 observe how much within the walls, especially 
 near the Eastern Gate, has crumbled into decay ; 
 for often where an altar or a temple or a portico 
 once stood there are nothing but hummocks of 
 ground with coarse grass and stagnant pools, and 
 here and there a fragment of a pillar or a cut stone, 
 or, what is still more ridiculous in appearance, a
 
 THE BARBARIANS 67 
 
 rude hut piled up of what was once the masonry of 
 a rich house ; nay, I have seen Greek work and 
 statuary mortared in between rough rubble by 
 these barbarians and the body of Athene lying 
 crosswise as a lintel for the cabin of one of these 
 dogs. 
 
 The people in the town speak all a welter of 
 barbaric dialects ; there is not a word of Greek in 
 the place ; and as for Latin, you hear it only in 
 degraded words among the populace : never fully 
 spoken save by clerics or in the rites of the altar, or 
 again in a sort of incomprehensible sing-song when 
 some officer of the barbarians is compelled to read a 
 deed or to plead in a priest's court for in these 
 rude places it is neither a dishonour nor perhaps a 
 bad thing that the very priests have jurisdiction. 
 
 Well, then, I proceeded some few miles to see the 
 Bishop himself, for it is another of their uncouth 
 tricks that they will put the Bishop's residence in 
 an outlying village neighbouring the town. This 
 man received me kindly and even with honour, 
 respecting the name of the Divine Emperor and the 
 glory of the city. He is unmarried and professes 
 that a priest is by nature a sort of monk, so that 
 none of his Order should be wedded or even es- 
 poused, though on this there is, I know, a dispute 
 throughout the provinces of the West ; moreover
 
 68 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 he would admit a widower. I desired of him an 
 escort (since I knew him more capable of giving it 
 than would be the kinglet of these half-human 
 savages), saying that it was my intention to visit 
 Anderida, of which our ancestor had been the 
 Bishop. In this statement he showed a lively 
 interest, promised all aid, and asked me by which 
 way I would go ; for there are three ways, either 
 along the plain of the coast, or again along a deserted 
 range of hills which runs all through that country, 
 or again, inland, to the north of these lines along 
 the fringe of a forest. It would be difficult to say 
 which gave the greater inconvenience or danger, 
 but I decided, upon his advice, to follow the plain 
 until the last harbour, and thence to run some 
 thirty stadia by sea till I should reach Anderida. 
 This I did, going through the most extraordinary 
 sights imaginable ; for here was a vast and fertile 
 plain, not incomparable to some that lie between 
 the mountains and the ^Egean Sea, yet not a vine- 
 stock to be seen nor hardly a well-built wall. 
 Here and there was a rough field of rye and still 
 more rarely wheat, though that ill-cultivated and 
 grassy. The road we followed had not been 
 maintained (for it had never been of military use) 
 and was the most shameful hotchpotch of good, 
 hard, ancient work, of ruts, and in places of nothing
 
 THE BARBARIANS 69 
 
 at all, and the chief danger was at the crossing of 
 the rivers. All the old bridges have long ago 
 broken down, and through one of the rivers, as 
 though it were a matter of course, our escort 
 fought its way against the wretched peasants 
 of the further bank. These claimed some sort of 
 toll or custom, which certainly we would not pay 
 them ; and to refuse payment my escort gave a 
 very extraordinary reason, not that we were 
 human beings, but that we were " Bishop's men." 
 I tell you the things as they happened, even 
 those which will be incomprehensible to you. We 
 came, then, after three or four days to the harbour, 
 where again we claimed a ship by right of some 
 divinity which is here supposed to inhabit the 
 clergy (as though they were Prefects, or of the 
 Sacred Palace), and in the ship, after two hours 
 sailing past a high head of white earth, we rounded 
 into the harbour of Anderida. 
 
 If what I had hitherto seen was desolation, here 
 was something far worse. For the site of the town, 
 lying as it does between the sea and a great dark 
 wood, of vast extent, has afforded but little oppor- 
 tunity to the barbarians, and the place, once 
 sacked, was abandoned. You have seen one or 
 two cities, perhaps, which have suffered from a 
 fire, and you will remember from the archives of
 
 70 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 our family that letter which our mother's grand- 
 father wrote when he was marching with Belisarius, 
 describing to us Timagaudi of the Nomads, where 
 it stood deserted on the edge of the desert. A 
 mixture of these two was all of what had been 
 Anderida. The strong city walls of stone and 
 brick still stand, but within them is nothing but 
 , mass of house-walls all charred by fire. Few 
 of these ruins exceed the height of a man ; 
 all the columns save one (both those of the 
 Colonnade along the Harbour and those of the 
 Basilica) lie prone. This one which still stands 
 was a supporter of the Temple of Jove. It is of 
 a foreign stone, carved in the manner of an early 
 time, and appears, I must say, like a thing un- 
 natural in the midst of this desolation. The votive 
 tablets have not been touched by the barbarians, 
 but all unconsecrated metal has been stolen long 
 ago, saving the strong iron mooring-rings along the 
 quay. There is not a sign in the place of human 
 beings or of oxen ; one does not hear the falling of 
 water, and I found nothing more full of silence 
 in this silent place than a fountain made, as is 
 customary, in the shape of a dolphin, but pouring 
 forth no water, for it was choked up with earth and 
 dry. Overhead the plovers, which are innumerable 
 in the marshes behind the harbour, continually
 
 THE BARBARIANS 71 
 
 scream. The shaggy natives, who in all this 
 district number, perhaps, but thirty households 
 between the great wood and the sea (though I am 
 told that in the wood there are burners of charcoal 
 and even a few rough workers of iron), have a dread 
 of the ruins, in which, as they maintain, are often 
 seen apparitions and demons. They have built 
 their huts outside the western wall, and have had 
 the place consecrated, I know not how often, by the 
 priests, who are here, as everywhere upon this 
 coast, superstitiously revered. These savages came 
 about in a group, not daring to enter the city, but 
 standing at the gate and gazing at my dress, 
 especially at the silken parts, with a kind of stupid 
 awe like children. Some of them spoke, I am told, 
 in the Celtic and some in the Teutonic method, but 
 I had neither the patience nor the ability to dis- 
 tinguish these jargons. Their movements were 
 slow, their bodies ill-fed, and the expression of 
 their eyes was very unintelligent, also they had a 
 habit of sitting at nightfall round a sort of central 
 fire crooning dolefully in their hamlet, which was 
 very disagreeable to us in our tents. 
 
 After two days of this (and they Were long 
 enough) more than one of our escort complained of 
 fever ; and as I know such deserted places to be 
 particularly dangerous in that regard, I determined
 
 72 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 to embark, chartering, for what seemed to the 
 owner a fortune, a small boat the largest of some 
 half-dozen which stood beached in spite of the 
 excellent harbour near by. 
 
 The barbarian in his ignorance and timidity was 
 for running along the coast until he could see 
 Gaul ; but I would have nothing of this, and bade 
 him steer boldly across, which he did, and we made 
 the mouth of the principal river of Gaul, and so 
 passed through regions declined indeed but ac- 
 quainted with wine and with the order of the 
 Sacred Palace and possessed of passable roads, 
 until we had come right down to Massilia, where 
 again (though it will seem to you to be a sort of end 
 of the world) it seemed to me home ; hearing, 
 accent or no accent, the Greek tongue and finding 
 men of a human kind. 
 
 Thence I send you these, with greetings to 
 Theodora, to Justin, and to the rest, and I shall be 
 with you, if the All Holy the Mother of God is 
 favourable, but a week or so after you shall have 
 read this letter.
 
 RONCESVALLES 
 
 AUGUST 15, 778 A.D. 
 
 The Mohammedans having conquered Spain, Charlemagne, 
 the greatest member of the greatest of Christian families, could 
 do no more than contain them by holding the Valley of the 
 Ebro, as upon another frontier he controlled the enemies of 
 Europe by holding the Valley of the Elbe. 
 
 Returning to Gaul by way of the Roman road and pass 
 (the Imus Pyrenceus) from a campaign in the Spanish March, 
 his rear-guard under Roland was overwhelmed by the moun- 
 taineers in the midst of the Pyrenees. This disaster gave rise 
 to the noblest of Christian epics
 
 RONCESVALLES 
 
 AUGUST 15, 778 A.D. 
 
 THE Army had come three days over the ridges 
 of the little hills, each higher than the last, 
 following the great Roman road that led west- 
 ward to Pampeluna. All the main body had 
 passed long before from its repulse on the Ebro, 
 and this, the rear guard, was perhaps three miles 
 in length, not more ; it was heavily impeded with 
 waggons ; some few of the richer men that had 
 fallen sick were carried in litters, and though the 
 way was still hard and good, centuries of Usage 
 had weakened it, especially at the base of each 
 ascent, and there were places where it failed alto- 
 gether, sunk into a marsh or crossing an arroyo 
 where the spring freshets of three hundred years 
 had broken the bridge and swept away the Talus. 
 At such places there was always an infinity of 
 trouble carts held back by hand, horses straining 
 to prevent the rush of the weight behind them, 
 confused noises and arguments and blows. So 
 
 they went slowly on. They were heavily laden 
 
 75
 
 76 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 with the spoils of cities, with the loot of the enemies 
 of the Faith, and with that heavy armament which 
 was so ill suited to the South. For very many were 
 covered to the knees with strong leather coats on 
 which great rings of metal interlaced made a 
 complete web, and others had scales of iron over- 
 lapping as the scales of a fish overlap. And all the 
 mounted men carried, slung to their saddles beside 
 incongruous bundles of booty, their little steel caps 
 and their great battle-axes, and some of the highest 
 rank were further encumbered with a mighty 
 elephant's tusk curiously carved, which they could 
 wind like a horn to summon their followers. 
 
 It was perhaps midday when they came upon a 
 vast open plain sloping gently towards the sun, and 
 here the road they had been following came in at 
 right-angles upon another and a larger road ; the 
 main road from Burgos and the south. This was 
 the road that went straight across the Imus Pyre- 
 nseus, the pass into Gaul ; it was the road which, 
 with its brother road, the Summus Pyrenaeus, 
 four marches to the east, formed the sole gates of 
 the Pyrenees. They halted for the midday meal, 
 but they did not halt for long. It was their 
 business to press forward out of this hard Iberian 
 land. The light cavalry of the Emirs hung all 
 round, white flashes of riding men well out of bow-
 
 RONCESVALLES 77 
 
 shot on their little desert horses, with here and 
 there the blazing red cloak of a Sheik or the shining 
 of a steel-linked coat among them. The leaders of 
 the Christians knew that by one accident and 
 another since they had ridden out of the gate of 
 Pampeluna the rate of marching had been hindered, 
 and that the main body was now far ahead, over on 
 the French side of the pass. The gap between this 
 rear-guard and the bulk of the Emperor's forces was 
 too wide for safety, and, though they had marched 
 under such a sun for so long, they were ordered, in 
 spite of grumbling and some short mutinies, to 
 press straight on. 
 
 The plain through which they hurried northward 
 sloped, as I say, slightly to the sun. It was like a 
 glacis, the rampart of which was the interminable 
 line of precipitous white cliffs which marked the 
 crest of the Pyrenees. These cliffs were of lime- 
 stone ; the sun shone on them full, and above them 
 the sky was intensely blue. For miles and miles 
 away to the right they stretched interminably 
 until they were lost in the perspective as one loses a 
 wall of great length standing straight along a level. 
 Just before the army, in the few miles between it 
 and the range, a noble great wood of beech and of 
 oaks spread as though it had been poured out in a 
 flood over the sloping landscape. Above these
 
 78 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 trees again a little grassy col made a notch upon 
 the skyline a little lower than the white mountain 
 cliffs on either side. This col was Roncesvalles ; 
 and across the green of it could most clearly be seen 
 climbing up under the sunlight the ribbon of the 
 road. 
 
 The villages through which they passed were 
 deserted (for the Basques were almost as much 
 their enemies as the Mohammedans were) ; they 
 had for food and for drink nothing but what they 
 carried ; they were exhausted when the last ascent 
 began. It was very soon surmounted ; it was 
 but a few hundred feet of easy meadow and the 
 climb was the easier because the troops could here 
 deploy, the column was shortened, and the dust 
 which added so much to their weariness was laid. 
 It was cooler for the height, and the sun, now in 
 full afternoon, was mellower and less dangerous. 
 A chapel which the Basques would use stood on 
 the height before them, and when they reached 
 the easy open saddle, the leaders saw one of those 
 sights whose sudden vision stimulates the legends 
 of history and is part of the glorious adventures 
 attached to the records of armies. 
 
 Here was a prodigious cleft running dead north, 
 thousands of feet sunk sheer into the earth, and 
 slowly widening its sides to where, far away at the
 
 RONCESVALLES 79 
 
 opening of it in the misty disance, in the V-shaped 
 mouth of the hills, like a calm sea in misty weather, 
 lay the Gascon plains. They were out of the hard 
 Iberian land, they were in sight of home ; thick 
 forests clothed the sides of the ravine and the 
 pleasant sound of water in its depths greeted their 
 return to Gaul ; the keener eyed among them 
 descried, or imagined that they descried, upon 
 the very distant landscape, the winding line of the 
 main army that followed Charlemagne. It was 
 but a few miles on to the Castle of St. John, the 
 first fortified and secure stronghold of Christendom, 
 which would receive them after the adventure of 
 the raid into the lost land and the dominion of 
 Mahound. 
 
 Roland of the Marches, who had with him two 
 companions and a little squad of servants, had 
 ridden rapidly before the rest, partly to grasp in 
 one view the nature of the road upon the down- 
 ward side, partly for he was of an affectionate 
 and dreaming kind to see, the first of all the army 
 he commanded, the fields of kinsmen again and 
 Christian land. They saw him upon his heavy 
 horse against the sky as they climbed the pass 
 behind him. He watched the valley in silence. 
 
 In that profound ravine there was no noise at all 
 except the running of the torrent in the forest
 
 80 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 below. The walls were very steep, so steep that in 
 places the beech-trees had lost their hold and had 
 fallen down the precipitous earth ; and perilously 
 along the front of that slope went the road. 
 Roland could see it clearly, first almost horizontal, 
 feeling its way along the safest contour of the 
 precipice ; here and there still supported by the 
 huge masonry work of Rome, then plunging 
 steeply in zigzags to the foot of the gulf, where it 
 was lost beneath the trees. There, on the floor of 
 the defile, perhaps three miles of marching below 
 him, it passed through a narrow place, where 
 steep rocks held it in on either side. No men 
 showed upon the mountains ; there was no move- 
 ment at all. For a moment the commander 
 wondered whether a flanking party ought not to 
 be sent along the ridge to secure the main body 
 from any attempt ; in another moment he had 
 seen that the plan would fail. As the valley 
 deepened all communication between the ridge 
 and the road became more difficult until, in but 
 a few hundred yards, it became impracticable 
 altogether, even for a handful of unarmed men. 
 He was determined to risk the road. 
 
 He wheeled his horse round upon that little 
 eminence, he and his companions, and stayed 
 there stock-still while the long train of men and
 
 RONCESVALLES 81 
 
 horses and wheels and the huge balistae and the 
 beasts of burden filed wearily by. He watched in 
 silence without commands of haste or fear, but 
 with an increasing anxiety, the declining of the 
 sun over the plains of Navarre, as the force defiled ; 
 then he came on behind them, from which post he 
 could best observe on the falling mountain road 
 the whole of his command. 
 
 He had not so ridden a mile when those lonely 
 hills began to have an uneasy and a dreadful life ; 
 it was all but evening, yet one could still clearly 
 distinguish the boulders and the bushes upon the 
 higher sweeps of grass and rock, and it seemed that 
 first one bush and then another moved ; but there 
 was no glint of steel, there were no cries, there was 
 no sign of that white signal of danger which a 
 scout may catch at almost any range the face of a 
 man. Nevertheless as the darkness gathered it was 
 certain and more certain that the deep shadows 
 were peopled, and that the forest itself into which 
 the head of the column had now plunged was 
 alive. 
 
 It was not yet quite night when suddenly a great 
 boulder leapt from the limestone ridge far, far 
 above the road, bounded down step upon step of 
 the ravine wall, and as it thundered revealed, tiny 
 in the distance of the upper air, a group of wild 
 
 F
 
 82 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 men whose cries were now answered immediately 
 on every side. The underwood awoke ; fierce 
 rushes from above and below broke the line at one 
 point and another and another. The Chivalry in 
 the rear, galloping and pressing through their own 
 men, could do nothing to rescue, and behind them 
 also the clansmen poured in. As the first stars 
 came out above the gorge, a steady carnage had 
 begun. 
 
 ***** 
 Long before the dawn the inhuman noise of that 
 forest ebbed into silence and was done. The 
 Basques slept by fires undisturbed, and every man 
 of the great Gaulish host, their enemy, was dead. 
 Then for days and days the gold and the steel, the 
 Weapons and the horses, the worked timber, and 
 the ivory and the lovely gems all the arts of 
 Christendom laboriously found way up tiny 
 mountain paths into the secret places of the 
 Pyrenees.
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 
 
 ABOUT 780 A.D. 
 
 Hardly was Europe creeping back to civilisation when, in the 
 eighth century, a furious assault upon it, far worse than 
 any earlier attack, broke from every side. The Scandinavian 
 and German Pagans, the Mohammedans and, later, roving 
 bands of Mongols attempted to destroy it. The energy of the 
 Gaulish and German ruling family which culminated in 
 Charlemagne checked the disaster, but after Charlemagne's 
 death it was renewed more fiercely than ever, and Europe 
 was barely saved by the resistance of Alfred and the Count of 
 Paris, more than a hundred years after the first attack. 
 
 The Faith was the particular object of this invasion of 
 " Roman land," whether by Arabs and Moors, as in Spain, or 
 by Scandinavian pirates, as in Britain. In what follows I 
 presume one of the first raids say about 780
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 
 
 ABOUT 780 A.D. 
 
 FOR now three nights, three days and the 
 morning of a fourth, they had gone easily 
 over the long but broken seas under the wind 
 called Eager, which blew from the north-east of 
 the world, and had in it at once the vigour of the 
 Arctic and the soul of the southern things which it 
 was seeking. 
 
 Their boat was long, broad and shallow. It 
 was shallower even than most of the boats that 
 stood all winter long lined up in sheds above high- 
 water mark upon the solemn shores of the Fjord : 
 for so the New Builder chose to build ships, though 
 against him there were in the tribe three opponents : 
 the Priest who saw a curse in all outlandish things ; 
 the owner of the Snake who did not desire his ship 
 to be surpassed ; and the Elder who was gentle, 
 and was evidently descended from the gods ; he 
 spoke in general for the village when he said that a 
 very flat boat Was a folly. 
 
 Nevertheless, Hraf, whom they called the Ugly 
 
 85
 
 86 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 (because in youth he had been ugly), had his new 
 ship built very broad in the beam and very shallow, 
 though a trifle longer than any other ; and he had 
 it so built because the New Builder desired it so, 
 and he followed the New Builder for this reason, 
 that the New Builder's father had been his father's 
 slave. 
 
 They had found him so frozen in the forest upon 
 the hills above the Fjord that he had forgotten his 
 name and the place from which he came. They 
 had brought him down to the hall and continually 
 fed him, warmed him, and drunken him, until he 
 was a man again, whereupon he became (most 
 joyfully to himself and most naturally) the slave 
 of those who had succoured him, and especially of 
 their chief, Hraf Bold, the father of Hraf the Ugly. 
 This frozen man, who had forgotten all things, was 
 a great worker in wood, and having married without 
 rites a lower woman of the place, had by her an only 
 son, a child who grew to be called the New Builder, 
 with whom Hraf the Ugly in his childhood played. 
 Full of such memories and secured by the sacred- 
 ness of his garth, which (as of a right was, to the 
 son of a village-founder) had 30 ft. upon the water- 
 side, he had built his ship freely, with sacrifice to 
 what god he chose out of the ten gods, and upon 
 what lines best pleased him ; and he had allowed
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 87 
 
 the lines to be made out by the New Builder, whom 
 many hated and all admired. The New Builder's 
 eyes had a slope to them, and there were those who 
 said that he Was of the blood of those little devils 
 who lived beyond the high hills. 
 
 Now, the New Builder was new enough in all 
 conscience, but his boat was wrong, and Hraf 
 come to know it when in this first voyage she 
 behaved so oddly in front of the wind. For she 
 buried her bows and she yawed, and whenever a 
 puff of wind caught her slantwise she pulled so 
 abominably at the helm that two men had to be 
 set to lean against it, and even so it kicked and 
 struggled like a thing that was alive ; so that 
 whatever men were set in the watches one of these 
 two, or both, perpetually cursed the New Builder 
 who would set a ship upon the stocks but did not 
 know how to model its frame. 
 
 Meanwhile all these days they ran before the 
 north-east wind called Eager. There was no rain. 
 By day small clouds drove hurriedly over the clean 
 and sparkling sky ; by night there were no clouds, 
 but, quite unencumbered, a protecting multitude 
 of stars : and the New Builder and Hraf, his 
 master, sat covered astern. 
 
 Forward, under the half -deck, the slaves sat 
 crouched, singing and making buffoonery for their
 
 88 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 master. The wide thwarts were empty, since the 
 wind was perpetually fair, and the oars were lashed 
 together in pairs under the bulwarks. Upon 
 either side the stays stood stiff ; the pine mast, 
 short as it was and stout, bent a little under the 
 pressure of the gale, and from time to time as a 
 stronger gust came upon them, though they were 
 running free, the cordage sang. 
 
 The thirty men that were free did nothing all day 
 long, but the meaner of them threw meat to the 
 slaves, or, in sheer need for merriment, went 
 forward and wrestled with them under the half- 
 deck, and the slaves allowed the throw. 
 
 It was now the morning of the fourth day ; the 
 air was no milder than it had been at their launch- 
 ing, but a mist had begun to drift above the foam, 
 and the yellow water was a sign to them that they 
 had come near to Roman land. The shields were 
 slung outboard ; the arms were passed forward for 
 cleaning, the slaves took on another temper, they 
 ceased their jesting and they began to scour the 
 metal to the accompaniment of harsh commands, 
 and two men were called aft the Seer and the 
 Pilot. As the ship (which was called Broad) rolled 
 excessively in the quiet water, each was bidden 
 speak in turn in the fashion that ritual demanded. 
 
 The Seer, therefore, when he had looked down a
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 89 
 
 little in silence at the planking, balancing himself 
 upon his legs to the roll of the vessel, chanted in a 
 monotone that he saw men richly clothed and 
 priests who served wealthy devils, vessels of silver 
 and of gold, great stores of meat preserved, man 
 hurrying for life and flames lighting up the evening 
 sky. And then swaying more violently in the 
 ecstasy which ritual also commanded, he thought 
 to hear the voices of gods and of women riding upon 
 horses in the upper air. All these things he said 
 had been sent him by the wind and went hurrying 
 with the wind towards the further shore. 
 
 To this incantation the freemen listened without 
 interest. 
 
 The slaves ceased their labour and heard it with 
 an absorbing fear. Hraf the Chief and the New 
 Builder neither smiled nor listened. For now a 
 generation past such ritual had grown empty, for 
 it was repeated always in the same tone and with 
 the same promises. But it was a solemn duty of 
 theirs and of the Seer that the rite should be per- 
 formed. Then the Seer drew back and lay among 
 the wolf-skins and the Pilot took his place upon 
 just that part of the planking which his predecessor 
 had held ; it Was marked off by a large square of 
 red painted upon the boards. 
 
 It was the Pilot's place not to speak, but to
 
 90 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 answer questions, and it was ritual for him, also, 
 to be exact, harsh and short ; for upon such a 
 ritual his prestige reposed. But when his turn had 
 come a new expression and light filled the faces of 
 the Chief and of the New Builder, since the Pilot 
 commonly added to all the ritual answers some 
 new thing. He was chosen out of those to whom 
 was handed on by their guild a knowledge of the 
 further shores of the sea. 
 
 Hraf said : " Do you see land ? " 
 The Pilot answered : " I see land." His back 
 was turned to the prow. He saw no land, but 
 such an answer ritual demanded. Then Hraf 
 next said : 
 
 " What land do you see ? " 
 He said : " Roman land." 
 Then Hraf asked for the third time : 
 " Turn round and name the land." 
 The Pilot turned round and looked to leeward 
 very carefully, intent now not upon ritual but 
 upon actual things. 
 
 Out there against the scud there was nothing 
 but the run of water, and though now and then one 
 part of the sky along the water seemed a little 
 darker against the brume, the shadow would lift 
 and change again. There was as yet no land. He 
 stood in that attitude for an hour and more ; and
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 91 
 
 such was the power of religion upon these bar- 
 barians that all watched in silence as he gazed ; 
 but religion here was real ; they were waiting for 
 a certain thing. 
 
 When he had gazed for an intolerable time he 
 began to move forward, holding to the bulwarks 
 in the roll that the Broad developed inordinately 
 as she entered shallower water. He clambered up 
 the three steps to the half-deck, he went forward 
 under the square sail till he got right up into the 
 bows, going on all fours until he caught the fore- 
 stay. Catching this with his left hand he threw 
 himself erect, and so standing lifted from its hook 
 the sounding-line. He swung it three times in air, 
 and slung it out five fathom beyond the foam of 
 the bow. It slipped through his fingers, and the 
 little whisp of sacred red, which they called in 
 their language " the mark," hissed sharply into the 
 sea. The line paid out astern, and as it paid the 
 Pilot ran, bent and very rapidly, aft, dodging round 
 the stays, catching the line again and letting it slip 
 through his fingers. Just before he had got to the 
 poop in this scramble of his the line slackened and 
 he hauled. He gathered it up with the slack in 
 his left hand in great loops leisurely, and went 
 forward to take his place again, hanging to the 
 forestay.
 
 92 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 There was no sound except the very little noise 
 which a boat makes running dead before a failing 
 wind, and now and then the slight clank of a 
 fitting, jerking as she rolled. He cast again, and 
 once again saw the mark hiss through the sea, and 
 once again came aft, leaping and dodging like a cat, 
 passing the line around the stays, but ending up 
 this time amidships, feeling bottom. He went 
 forward for the third time. 
 
 This time he stayed longer. The shoal was 
 more and more apparent ; the seas began to run 
 across and tumbled ; the freemen stood up in their 
 places. The slaves forward peered up in curiosity 
 above the half-deck. Hraf and the New Builder 
 alone kept their places undisturbed as the rank of 
 the one and the respect of the other for his Chief 
 required that they should do. The two men at the 
 long and sculptured helm began to look more 
 anxious and to strain their ears for orders. In the 
 midst of this attention there suddenly appeared, 
 right before them, a shore less high than a house, 
 windswept and full of tangled grasses, and inland 
 they could see, just see, those tiles and that belfry 
 of a Christian church which marked a Roman 
 harbour. The Pilot cast again. The weight struck 
 before the line came tautened, and the red mark 
 was over water and dry.
 
 THE DANISH BOAT 93 
 
 The Pilot called out exultantly : " Mark deep " ; 
 and hardly had he done so when three men knowing 
 the signal ran forward and lined up, the one 
 clinging to the mast forward of the sail, where he 
 could see the Pilot fully, the next just behind the 
 mast where he could hear the words of his comrade, 
 the third amidships to pass on the command to the 
 helm. 
 
 For twenty minutes after that there was a series 
 of shouted orders as the weight and the line showed 
 shoal to the left or to the right : 
 
 " Left board hard ! " " Right board all ! " 
 
 " Right board hard ! " " Right ! " and " Hard 
 over ! " twice, as there came a sudden bend in the 
 channel. 
 
 Then the tide took the Broad, the Peak, which 
 had been dropped during this manoeuvre, was 
 hoisted again, the banks were clear, close and 
 defined, the pace was rapid, the water calm. They 
 reefed up the sail to see well under it, and all of 
 them knew that they were at last in a Roman 
 river. 
 
 They let go past them in disdain, as they swept 
 up the stream, small hamlets from which men fled 
 or from the shores of which the bolder aimed at 
 them ineffectual arrows. At last, after miles of 
 going so between the marshes, they saw before
 
 94 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 them a great group of square towers and roofs, and 
 especially that cluster of churches which were for 
 them the mark of plunder. 
 
 But already the weight came up muddy, and, 
 even for the light draught of the Broad, the river 
 had grown doubtful. The heavy stone which was 
 their mooring (for they despised the Roman 
 anchor) was slung overboard at the bows, and its 
 cable was fastened to bitts. The down stream, 
 already strong with inland water and with the 
 slack of the tide, kept them steady. The slaves 
 were landed ; they cast up a mound and were set 
 to watch. 
 
 The next day these few pirates demanded ransom 
 of the outer monasteries of Norwich.
 
 THE SAXON SCHOOL 
 
 THE SUMMER OF 1002 
 
 Winchester was the centre of Saxon England. Hyde, the 
 great Abbey outside the gates, was to Winchester what West- 
 minster was later to London. In what follows, a school in the 
 neighbourhood and attached to the Abbey is imagined, just 
 'before the last Danish conquest and harrying of that valley
 
 THE SAXON SCHOOL 
 
 THE SUMMER OF 1002 
 
 UP on Itchen, on a gravel bank that looked 
 southward over the rapid clarity of the 
 stream, stood a long hut, thatched. 
 
 It was made in this way : Young oaks and 
 beeches had been split asunder lengthways, and 
 trimmed a little at the sides, but roots had been left 
 rough and large. The outer rounded sides, with 
 the bark still on, had also been left untouched. 
 The smooth split side made the inward wall, and 
 the bark made the outward. It was as deep as 
 a stable might be, but very low. A man, even 
 without his helmet on, had to bow in order to pass 
 under the lintel. In length it was perhaps 50 ft. 
 There were but few windows in it, and those windows 
 were not glazed. The thatch was old, patched and 
 patched over again, with one quite new piece at 
 the corner, where a travelling Welshman had 
 thatched it, for the people of the place thatched ill, 
 and indeed in every art they trusted to the foreigner 
 
 from beyond the sea or from beyond the marshes. 
 
 97
 
 98 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 This long, low hut was a school, but to what 
 parish it belonged no one could ever have told you, 
 for it belonged to several and custom was very 
 confused : but in the main it belonged to, and was 
 judged by, the Abbey of Hyde, where lay the bones 
 of Alfred, and where there was chanting all day 
 long. In the Stokes, both Worthy and Kingly, as 
 also in Sutton, which was the Bishop's Farm, little 
 children were taught after Mass whatever is neces- 
 sary to a Christian man as, the Four Last Things, 
 the Seven Deadly Sins, the Twelve Gifts of the 
 Holy Ghost, the Hail Mary, both in Latin and in a 
 local rigmarole of which the populace were fond ; 
 the Pater Noster in Latin alone and the Creed by 
 heart, with a little prize for whoever could say it 
 quickest by Easter Day. Then also they were 
 taught the alphabet and how to carve it upon wood, 
 and they were taught the names of the months and 
 the days in each, and what things the Patriarchs 
 did (especially the miracles), and among these 
 nothing more fully than the story of Adam and Eve 
 and of the Flood. 
 
 These things were taught in the village churches 
 after Mass on Sunday, but the school here on Itchen 
 was of a different kind. To begin with, the site 
 was sacred, the church of Itchen Stoke lay just to 
 the east upon a sward, and between it and the
 
 THE SAXON SCHOOL 99 
 
 school was a circle of stones which heathens had 
 raised to devils before our Lord came, and before 
 St. Joseph had landed at the mouth of Avon and 
 had built the Holy Hut at Glastonbury ; a thorn 
 from Glastonbury grew beside the door. 
 
 This school was for such as would learn more 
 than was necessary to every Christian man. It 
 was for such as desired to read Boethius and Virgil 
 and all the Offices. It was also for those who would 
 know history from the beginning of the world, and 
 how to reckon large sums and small, and the names 
 of strange beasts, and what countries there were 
 throughout the world. 
 
 Twenty or thirty at the most of the boys and 
 young men of the place came here on every day of 
 the week, except on Feast Days, and a monk from 
 Hyde taught them. It had so run for more than 
 one hundred years since Alfred died. Any one 
 that would learn might come from after Mass till 
 the meal before noon, and that meal he should have 
 free in recompense for his study, to which end the 
 school was endowed and called after the name of 
 Our Lady of Good Knowledge Bonce Sapientice 
 of whom an image, carved in oak by Gauls, stood 
 above the roof, turning with the tail of the serpent, 
 whom she crushed, by way of weathercock. The 
 endowment of this school was a field worth twenty
 
 100 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 shillings, which is an ox team, that is, twelve 
 shillings to the school, five shillings to Winchester, 
 and the other three shillings to the King but 
 always twelve shillings to the school, even in a bad 
 harvest, though the rest should bide, and the King, 
 when he wore his crown at Winchester, would 
 commonly make largesse of the three shillings to 
 the school at Pentecost, so that the scholars could 
 be provided for without need of then* work for hay 
 or harvest. 
 
 Upon the day which was the Feast of Our Lady 
 of Good Knowledge there was a holiday there, and 
 an annual quarrel between the Father Tutor and 
 the Priest of Stoke for the use of the church, and 
 in this quarrel youths were often wounded and 
 sometimes killed, and the Bishop of the city in- 
 variably decided for the parish. On such an 
 occasion monks would come from Hyde, bearing 
 some relic of Alfred, and would proudly bear it 
 in procession around the school, to the intolerable 
 exasperation of the priest. 
 
 The school, I say, had stood a hundred years and 
 more ; since Alfred and now Sweyn was near. It 
 was summer. The harvest had just been stacked 
 into the barns, and the boys were droning in their 
 manner louder than the bees outside. The sun 
 fell full upon Itchen, caught on its twenty million
 
 THE SAXON SCHOOL 101 
 
 little ripples, and the dancing light from that water 
 shone reflected through the door in a moving 
 pattern upon the walls and ceiling of the room. 
 The Father Tutor had twice repeated in Latin the 
 phrase of dismissal, when he called a young man up 
 before his desk and said to him : " Now are you fit 
 to be a clerk, and at Michaelmas you shall come 
 from your father's forge to Hyde. But if you 
 would come now, first show me what you know." 
 When he had said this the young man waited a 
 little, and then repeated in Latin the Psalm " In 
 Exitu," and all the while the old man nodded his 
 head contentedly, for no pupil of his had been so 
 word-perfect since the child of the London woman 
 had died in the green Christmas of five years 
 before. Then the lad said, in their order, to the 
 admiration of his companions, the major prayers, 
 and answered rightly upon the Emperors of Rome 
 and the feats that Virgil did in his brazen tower, 
 and the descendants of Noah, one by one, till it was 
 plain that there was no end to his learning. 
 
 The old man was ready to take him away, and 
 they went together over the water meadow towards 
 Hyde and the city, talking in the Latin tongue, and 
 without one word in the vulgar, upon divine 
 things, until they came to the gate of the Abbey, 
 where the Brother Porter, who had been warned,
 
 102 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 asked them, as ritual would have it, in the name of 
 Alfred, " whom he brought there." The Tutor 
 answered : " One who would be a priest." Then 
 the porter said : " What will he do for his priest- 
 hood ? " And the boy answered in reply : "I 
 will forge in the Abbey forge." When he had said 
 this they led him in, and they shut the gates 
 behind him, as though to cut him off from the 
 world.
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTINGS 
 
 On October 14, 1066, a great body of men from att parts of 
 Europe, a few of them Italian, many Breton, but most of them 
 French, led by William the Duke of Normandy, who claimed 
 Edward the Confessor's inheritance, defeated upon a hillside 
 called "Hastings Plain" above the river Brede the leas 
 civilised supporters of Harold, who, under that provincial noble, 
 had marched at full speed from Yorkshire to meet the invaders. 
 The contest was not determined till very late in the day, and, 
 while there was no regular pursuit, the cutting off of laggards 
 and the attempt to prevent the information and^ reorganisation 
 of the enemy could only be pursued after sunset
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTINGS 
 
 THE hermit in the wood beyond the Brede was 
 very proud. He was not proud by nature-^- 
 on the contrary, it was humility which had made 
 him become a hermit, but a long acquaintance with 
 mankind, with whom he favourably compared, 
 and the increasing reverence of his neighbours had 
 made him proud. He was proud because all the 
 way from Dungeness to the Weald up to Crow- 
 borough Top he was the only Holy Man. There were, 
 indeed, the parish priests, though but few even of 
 these in the uplands, in the marsh parishes, and 
 especially along the sea-shore, but they were of 
 little account in his eyes, and of no very great 
 account in those of their parishioners. Some were 
 married over the left, some brazenly married and 
 given to argument that such marriage was tolerable. 
 All were drunken. He would wager that there 
 was no man tonsured between Thames and the 
 sea that could properly interpret the Creed : the 
 Apostles' Creed, let alone the Nicene Creed. Nay, 
 there were few that did not make a slip in the 
 
 105
 
 106 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 spoken parts of the Mass, and when it came to 
 singing it was deplorable. For his part it was his 
 bounden duty to walk over into the valley of the 
 Rother and hear Mass upon Sundays and upon 
 certain Feasts, but he sat there in his little hut 
 waiting for the day when good hermits should be 
 the pattern of mankind, and he himself should be 
 a priest as a priest should be. But he would not 
 take orders ; not he ; he would have nothing to do 
 with the accursed hand of Stigand. He had once 
 walked to Canterbury. It had taken him two days 
 and the sight he saw at the end of it was quite 
 enough. He cursed all those who made lax the 
 service of God, and when any man made mention 
 of the Archbishop in his presence he spat upon the 
 ground. 
 
 He sat thus lonely in his little hut, with an ex- 
 pectation which was at once vague and convincing 
 that better things were at hand. The lords were 
 decayed, the clergy were corrupt, ignorant and 
 rare, the populace had no voice even the keen and 
 talkative men who worked about the charcoal 
 smelting-forges were besotten in temperament and 
 servile ; but better things were at hand. How 
 they would come he could not tell. He thought, 
 indeed, that the worst of the darkness had past, 
 for there had been news, days and days past, of the
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTINGS 107 
 
 landing of yet another host of pirates ; yet he 
 waited with an interior faith for order, for a light 
 spread over the land and for a dignified and fixed 
 society. 
 
 He was just upon eighty years old. He had 
 something of a memory and, above all, a tradition 
 of better things, for his father had revered and 
 followed Dunstan, and he himself had hung up 
 against the wall of his hut a leaden image of that 
 man whom he already called a saint. In Mayfield 
 he had friends who thoroughly agreed with this 
 contempt of his for the decline of the countryside, 
 and who partially understood his clinging to a 
 resurrection of it. 
 
 Filled thus with a large dream, very confused 
 but very powerful, he sat that night and slowly 
 drank his ale out of a large, round, wooden bowl 
 which he held up to his mouth with both hands as 
 he supped it. It was a good four hours after sun- 
 down and there was no kind of noise in the Vale of 
 Brede. A damp and somewhat cold mist was over 
 all the countryside, and every now and then one 
 could hear the drip of the wet falling from the 
 leaves of the trees. 
 
 To him thus melancholy there stumbled in 
 through the opening of the hut (for it had no door) 
 a wounded man.
 
 108 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 This man was very tall in stature, not very 
 broad-shouldered, strong in the muscles of the arms, 
 and uncertain in his gait. His face was long and 
 narrow, hair let to grow for weeks straggled over 
 it, and it was as pale and dull as a wet leaf in 
 autumn. The man had light blue eyes, not without 
 fever. He staggered down, flopping upon the bench 
 which ran by the side of the hut, and stared at the 
 hermit for a good half -minute without speaking ; 
 the hermit, looking at him, saw that all his left arm 
 was bandaged up in rough rags ; they were dirty 
 and saturated with blood. 
 
 The new-comer spoke in a weak tone and yet 
 with violence, but what he said was quite un- 
 intelligible. From his accent he was certainly 
 northern, perhaps a Northumbrian man, but it 
 was stupid of him to speak his language in the 
 south. The hermit spoke rapidly to him in Latin. 
 It meant nothing to him. Then he spoke to him 
 slowly in Latin, but the man only replied by a 
 stupid glare. Then the hermit, in a careful and 
 very chosen accent, recited what was best known 
 as a common greeting between wanderers and 
 himself, separating out each syllable. 
 
 " Fi-li mi quid quse-ris ? " 
 
 The stranger, who was already drooping with 
 exhaustion, looked at him dully, and replied by
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTINGS 109 
 
 pulling out a loose tooth and letting his chin fall 
 upon his chest. The hermit had not known that 
 there were men this side of the sea who could not 
 understand so simple a Latin phrase. There was 
 no one in Sussex but could have answered it. That 
 a Kentish man should not follow the speech of men 
 from down the coast would be excusable enough, 
 for the dialects of the coast varied, but that any 
 human man should be quite dumb before the 
 simplest conventional phrase of everyday Latin 
 was a thing the hermit could not understand. He 
 had heard that the pirates were like this, and there 
 fell upon him that disgust and fear of the barbarian 
 which, to men who love civilisation and order, is 
 the disgust and fear of a reptile ; but his Christianity 
 overcame. He let the wounded man lie down upon 
 the bench, he covered him with a thick cloth, and 
 he put under his head a heap of straw. The 
 wounded man lay there and stared, still quite 
 stupidly, now at the burning tow in the tallow- 
 bowl, now at the darkness outside the doorway. 
 As he lay, he muttered continually between his 
 swollen lips and with his wounded and broken 
 mouth words of the north country ; that Tostig 
 was a great lord ; that Harold was a great lord ; 
 that he knew not which was lord of his lord ; that 
 lords should not force poor men to fight ; that he
 
 110 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 had come through many lands and hated them 
 all ; that he hated most this land in which a plain 
 man was asked to fight against horses, and was 
 hit about the head with iron, and in which not even 
 the men of the place would speak a Christian 
 tongue, but only sorcery. So far as any emotion 
 remained in him, it was a fear that the hermit 
 would bewitch him. He had distinctly heard him 
 use the language of incantation. 
 
 Meanwhile the hermit understood nothing of all 
 this, but was still bewildered, wondering who on 
 earth this man could be, and deciding at last that 
 he must be one of those pirates who had so recently 
 landed, and of whom he had heard that they were 
 not ten miles away, and whose battle it was which 
 had made a distant clamour over the brow of the 
 hill that very afternoon. 
 
 The old man sat there quite silent, and bit by 
 bit his wounded guest muttered less and less 
 audibly, and was at last silent also. 
 
 It was now near midnight when the hermit 
 heard outside the noise of horse-hoofs soughing in 
 the wet clay of the woodland. He had more 
 visitors. There came in two men very different 
 from anything he had met before. The one was 
 still covered in a coat of fine-linked mail, with a 
 leather girdle and hanging from it a very large
 
 THE NIGHT AFTER HASTING 111 
 
 sword. His head was uncovered and round, the 
 hair cropped close, the face clean shaven, with a 
 square jaw and vigorous deep brown eyes. The 
 other was dressed in fine cloth, his gloves had fur 
 upon them, and he carried himself like a man who 
 was always dainty and unwilling to undergo fatigue. 
 In these men there was no hesitation. The first 
 of them (who was in armour) spoke at once in the 
 Church Latin with much such an accent as the 
 hermit had heard on the lips of monks from Devon- 
 shire, with whistling " u's " and broad " a's " but 
 with a foreign thinness. He asked whether any man 
 had taken refuge in the hut. Then his eye fell 
 upon the figure which lay quite still upon the bench. 
 That companion of his who was not in armour 
 spoke in a sort of soft and musical southern Latin 
 which the hermit could still just follow, and re- 
 peated the question of his companion. The hermit 
 answered : 
 
 " My lords, you are great lords. I know nothing 
 of this man, except that I have given him charity." 
 
 The new-comers were soldiers, and true soldiers 
 had never yet been in the island. Their reticence, 
 their decision, their immediate actions were ap- 
 palling to the hermit. The short man in armour 
 beckoned sharply towards the outer darkness. 
 He was at once obeyed. Two serving-men, short
 
 112 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 also, bullet-headed also, stamped with the same 
 stamp as their lord, came in at once, leading between 
 them a tall, fair, lumbering man who was closely 
 bound. They bade him speak to the wounded 
 figure on the bench and interpret for them. The 
 prisoner did not disobey, but quite willingly spoke in 
 that northern dialect of his a few incomprehensible 
 words, and then shook his head. The hermit did 
 not understand the words, but he half understood 
 the gesture. He leant over the bench, and making 
 the sign of the Cross upon himself and afterwards 
 in the air above the head of the wounded man, he 
 said to them in Latin : " He is dead." 
 
 The Norman knight and his Italian companion 
 stood somewhat relaxed at the news, but not un- 
 pleased, as if a long quest, to which they had been 
 ordered and which they had themselves thought 
 useless, was now ended. They left with the hermit 
 two of their serving-men and money for the burial 
 and for one Mass only. The money was of a sort 
 the hermit had not seen before. 
 
 These lords then rode out into the night with 
 their followers, making for their camp, and next 
 morning the hermit hired with the money given 
 him six woodland men, who bore the Northumbrian 
 upon a litter, and he was buried in the churchyard 
 over the hill by the Rother, and one Mass was said 
 for his soul.
 
 RUNNYMEDE 
 
 JUNE 15, 1215 
 
 On June 15, 1215, the League of Officials, wealthy merchants, 
 higher clergy and Barons met the King, John (against whom 
 they had risen after his defeat abroad), on the far side of 
 Thames, opposite Staines, having marched that morning from 
 London. He there assented to a Great Charter confirming 
 their privileges, which they had drawn up for him to sign. 
 John, after signing, took the field, hammered the rebels, and 
 would, but for an untimely death, have easily recovered the rights 
 of the central government against the aristocracy 
 
 H
 
 RUNNYMEDE 
 
 JUNE 15, 1215 
 
 THERE is an unmistakable noise of cavalry 
 upon the march which is not very unlike 
 the noise of the sea when it breaks gently against 
 a shingle beach the day after a storm. 
 
 This noise was heard a long way off down the 
 straight Roman Road. 
 
 The village of Staines had long expected to hear 
 that noise, for orders had gone on before to make 
 things ready for a crossing. It was near the longest 
 day of the year, and within a fortnight of St. John's 
 Eve, that the news came to them, and they had 
 made ready for now two days ; for the host, rather 
 wealthy than large, but still considerable, would 
 have found no sustenance in the place if provision 
 had not been made. The summer had been early 
 and there was already hay from the Abbey mead at 
 Chertsey. It was bought at a high price, but was 
 likely to be sold at a higher still. Oats had come 
 down the river, though at Windsor there had been 
 strict orders not to sell ; the chandlers had gone 
 
 115
 
 116 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 further afield to the Middle Hythe, and had had, 
 a few of them, the best of luck in Cookham market 
 unknown to the King ; for the King was secretly 
 forbidding market. 
 
 The people of Staines, being for the most part 
 poor people, had made a story of the quarrel 
 between the King and the rich men, and (being 
 poor people) had taken sides and made a sort of 
 game of it. Further away, in Bedford or at Oxford, 
 the thing had become a sort of legend, and men 
 went together in masses for their lord or for the 
 King ; many more went by the priest, and took 
 sides according to his leaning for the priest was 
 often a good man but this was in the remoter 
 villages. 
 
 Further still, no noise of the quarrel had come, 
 but only the plain knowledge of it, and a vague 
 interest at that : " Let them fight it out ! There 
 have been many wars ! Wars are good things." 
 
 Right away at the ends of the country, in the 
 Counties Palatine, upon the Marches and on the 
 westward slope of Devon, the minds of men were 
 made up ; the heart of the kingdom was in trouble 
 as usual, but they were healthy and secure and they 
 despised all this Frenchified turmoil. Only right 
 up north could you have found partisans ; there, 
 indeed, so many lords, great and small, agreed
 
 RUNNYMEDE 117 
 
 together and had for so long agreed, had so filled 
 their benefices and were so supported by the great 
 isolated monasteries of their countrysides that all 
 the world went together and was determined that 
 John was a wicked man and there was an end of 
 it. Yorkshire was a sort of separate country on 
 the matter, and for a little the three Ridings would 
 have risen and marched south together. 
 
 Not so the village of Staines. London was the 
 county town of Staines, and Staines vaguely de- 
 spised London a place in which a poor man had 
 no mind of his own. Staines, left to itself, would 
 have naturally decided against those rich and 
 offensive merchants who were always for rebellion 
 at a price. But then Staines was in the shadow of 
 Windsor. Hugh, the Frenchman, had been hit 
 by a forester, and the forester had paid no guild. 
 Bertram, called " of Brittany " (which place neither 
 he nor his father had ever seen but he was a 
 swaggering fellow and loved a name !), may have 
 been lying when he said that he fought with the 
 giant who was porter at the Castle gate, but 
 whether he was lying or not, he had most certainly 
 been shut up for three days, and had only appeared 
 at Mass upon Sunday with a growth of hair on his 
 chin and a starved look which was intolerable to 
 his fellow villains of Staines. Imprisonment was
 
 118 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 for rich men, enemies of the King, not for poor 
 men with wives and children dependent upon their 
 labour. Moreover, after Mass, the wife of Bertram 
 (miscalled of Brittany) had railed at him publicly 
 and had taunted him. All this his fellows laid to 
 the King. Then also, we must not forget that a 
 Serjeant of the King's, hurrying to London with a 
 writ, had his horse shod at the Bridge Forge, by 
 the stream, and had gone off without paying, which 
 was a most abominable thing. 
 
 The people of Staines, therefore, divided between 
 their contempt of London and their dislike of a 
 King close by, all in a castle and breeding haughti- 
 ness in his servants, naturally made two factions ; 
 but the factions only played a game, and the real 
 interest of both was to know that a fight was on. 
 
 In this early morning, therefore, many were out 
 and watching eastward along the Roman Road, 
 and many heard that first unmistakable noise of 
 cavalry marching. 
 
 Long before you could distinguish men you could 
 see, twinkling down the perspective of the rigid line 
 of paving, sparkles of colour ; and the sun, already 
 high though the hour was so early, caught metal 
 here and there. 
 
 As the host advanced it grew in clamour and hi 
 vividness. It made an excellent show and it
 
 RUNNYMEDE 119 
 
 delighted the people of Staines. Women began 
 to call their children to come out and see, and when 
 the cavalcade passed the two Roman altar-stones 
 which marked the sacred boundary of the manor 
 upon the highway, you might say that all the people 
 of Staines, nearly a thousand of them, were making 
 a hedge upon either side of the road to watch the 
 rich men and the clerks and their crowd of servants 
 go by. 
 
 The Barons affected not to see the populace, 
 putting on the attitudes which go well with arms. 
 By a sort of worthy pomposity serving no useful 
 end, but acting as a symbol, most of them were 
 armed even at this hour. The wealthier here and 
 there had visors hinged to their helmets, but they 
 did not carry the affectation so far as to keep them 
 closed. They had them thrust up above the 
 forehead and from beneath them their square 
 French faces stood out framed and shaven. The 
 smith of the Bridge Forge pointed one of these 
 visor-rarities out to his little son and said : "It 
 is a new fashion. Your uncle made such a thing 
 in Easter week, but he broke it in the making." 
 
 The lesser men of the cavalcade had neither the 
 affectation of arms nor of silence ; they jostled 
 together, they joked at the crowd as they passed, 
 and the tonsured clerks upon their mules were
 
 120 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 universal butts, but they took the jokes good- 
 naturedly, and one of them, whom a man in the 
 crowd had punched a little too hard as he passed, 
 said over his shoulder : " Suadente diabolo ! . . . 
 It is matter of excommunication ! . . . I am of 
 the wood of which Popes are made ! " 
 
 To which the villain who had punched him 
 answered : " Not with such knots in it ! " 
 
 And the aged ritual joke provoked more laughter 
 than if it had been new. 
 
 For close upon two hours they straggled by, if 
 you count the heavy and broad-wheeled waggons 
 that came after them, all piled with stuff and tent- 
 poles, and here and there arms. 
 
 The horses were all stout, fresh and new, com- 
 mandeered in London, for the horses of the forced 
 march from Bedford had been sold for nothing to 
 the knackers and the small men of London, and 
 the Barons, especially the northern Barons (who 
 took a special pride in horses), had seized all that 
 was best in the capital, paying for it by promises 
 upon the King, their enemy. 
 
 The host came to the bank of the river, and there 
 they deployed. The grass was new and fresh, but 
 they soon trampled it down ; they stretched from 
 the mouth of the Colne a mile and more down 
 stream, and ready for them, like a little fleet,
 
 RUNNYMEDE 121 
 
 were the ferry-boats from miles above and 
 below. 
 
 The June morning was clear and brisk, but the 
 air smelt of recent rain, and the river was running 
 heavy over the weir. The old stones, which marked 
 where, centuries before, a Roman bridge had 
 stood, were covered by the flood, and showed like 
 gleaming bosses under the rush of the river. 
 Squared timber lay piled upon either bank, all oak 
 from Windsor, but the new bridge was not yet 
 begun. One hour after another the big ferry- 
 boats took over horses and men. Only, of all that 
 host, not a fifth passed the stream ; only the rich 
 men and the more important of the clerks and the 
 servants of either. All those whose rank entitled 
 them to such an exhibition, and who were not 
 already armed, put on their shirts of steel links 
 and strapped on their heavy scabbarded swords 
 before the crossing, and so crossed ready. 
 
 Upon the further shore was the wide stretch of 
 turf called Runnymede. 
 
 At the far end of a mile or so of flat and mown 
 grass the carpenters had put up a stage. There 
 were short painted masts with forked pennants 
 upon them, and a very gay tent, upon the drooping 
 portal of which stood, as upon a banner, in flaming 
 crimson against gold, the three leopards of Anjou,
 
 122 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and sitting under this, full in the sunlight that 
 beat upon him from the east and south, sat a man 
 who bore, concentrated in his gesture, though he 
 was seated and had for the moment a royal repose 
 about him, the energy of the Plantagenet. His 
 sound, cropped, powerful head, thick neck, high 
 shoulders and broad, his exquisite care in dress 
 and the concealed contempt and anger of his eye, 
 would have betrayed him even under a disguise 
 for the King. As he sat there with all the cir- 
 cumstance of kingship about him, he could not be 
 approached without awe. At his right stood, with 
 the utmost ceremony and in the fullest accoutre- 
 ment, the Archbishop, pretending an impartial 
 service, behind whom was a retinue ; upon his 
 left, down the steps of the platform, were many 
 who were not noble in blood but who had 
 served him as soldiers in his wars, and who showed 
 more than their master the anger that they felt 
 against the wealthy rebels. 
 
 Towards this group advanced, in a deputation, 
 some dozen of the greater men and two clerks. 
 Far behind them, upon a table that they had 
 found placed, was a parchment attended by a group 
 of priests. The King seemed not to see it. But 
 he fixed his gaze steadily and courteously upon the 
 advancing group. He rose, in spite of his rank,
 
 RUNNYMEDE 123 
 
 and went down the steps towards them with a sort 
 of undulating walk which, for all his reputation 
 and his known valour, was offensive to the men 
 who watched him. He smiled ; he seemed at 
 ease and he greeted his enemies as though the 
 function were one of honour to himself and to them. 
 
 Then they knew, as did the crowd behind them, 
 that the Charter would be signed. Guy of Clifton 
 was very glad, for he knew that the weir over the 
 Thames before his house would be lifted, and that 
 he could make what revenue of fish he chose. And 
 Godfrey of Poynings was gladder still, for he knew 
 that his fine would be judged by the custom of the 
 Rape of Bramber, and that no neighbour would dare 
 to recover. All these great men and small in the 
 feudal crowd were glad for one reason of money or 
 another, and they saw that their demands were 
 secure. 
 
 What they did not see was the flaming outburst 
 of the soldier, the way that he would break his word 
 to pieces in his anger as he had broken a sword 
 upon the marble table in his anger at Rouen ; they 
 did not see the great raid to the north, the burn- 
 ing farms and the campaign of fury that all but 
 restored kingship to England.
 
 John's son, King Henry III., a man of great piety, disturbed 
 by yet another rebellion of his Barons and the wealthy of London, 
 after certain successes came down to the Cinque Ports and so up 
 over Cuckmere from the east to Lewes with his army in early 
 May, 1264. The Barons' army and their allies from London 
 lay at Fletching, in the Weald of Sussex, to the north of Lewes and 
 of the Downs, under the guidance of Simon de Montfort, a mystic, 
 son of that great French noble who, a generation before, had 
 destroyed the Albigensian Heretics. On May 12, this rebel 
 army received the challenge of the King, and on the 13th it broke 
 camp and approached the escarpment of the Downs, in order 
 to reach Lewes, where the King's army lay
 
 THE ARMIES BEFORE LEWES 
 
 MAY 13, 1264 
 
 AS the Ides of May came near, the royal army, 
 under a fresh morning, followed the narrow, 
 sunken and tortuous road that led from Hurst- 
 monceaux along the Vale of Glynde. At such an 
 hour it might have been summer, so thick was the 
 air with a pleasant mist, above which Firle, massive 
 and bare, stood silent. New grass had changed 
 every aspect of the valley, and the thickets, now 
 in full leaf, hid with their beauty chance robbers 
 of the Weald whom the noise of the march from 
 Winchelsea and along the castles of the sea-coast 
 had attracted out of their woods. Now they fell 
 upon an exhausted straggler when the host had 
 passed ; now upon some waggon, stuck fast in the 
 heavy clay, and miles behind the rear-guard. For 
 it had rained all night with a warm rain, and the 
 trampling of the horse along the straight lane had 
 left a morass behind, difficult for the baggage- train. 
 The cuckoo was twice heard towards Alfristone, 
 and from a spinney that fringed Mount Caburn 
 
 127
 
 128 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 came the mockery of nightingales, when, not later 
 than nine o'clock, the four trumpets and the 
 banner (which was the banner of Britain, a dragon 
 inherited from the Kings of Wessex and from their 
 ancestors, the free and wild princes of the Devonian 
 hills, of Cornwall, of the Usk, of Caerleon, and of 
 Tintagel) topped the rise from which can be seen, not 
 a mile away beyond the river, the height of Lewes. 
 
 The new stones of the wall shone white against 
 the morning (for the sun perpetually showed be- 
 tween the clouds, which now had begun to scurry 
 across the sky), and to the left, down the Valley 
 of the Ouse, the marshes gleamed at high tide. 
 
 No one had made a muster of the host, but it 
 was far smaller than the garrison had expected. 
 Too many horses had been thrown away at Ton- 
 bridge, and there had been too much forcing of 
 the pace in that great sweep of theirs round 
 eastward by the Cinque Ports towards Lewes, the 
 stronghold of the Guarrennes. They rode into the 
 town. 
 
 There was no one in the town who could tell them 
 how much or what the rebel army had done ; but 
 a shepherd from the Downs had brought news that 
 a gipsy had given him, saying how a great host was 
 already gathered in the Weald, and this was all 
 they knew.
 
 THE ARMIES BEFORE LEWES 129 
 
 The Ides of May were approaching, but had not 
 yet come, when they learnt that the enemy lay 
 near. A herald came in with the letters of De 
 Montfort, and to these the King replied. 
 
 Night fell, and there was no certainty in the 
 garrison or upon the walls. Prince Edward sat 
 right into the night with Luzignan, drinking wine 
 and rilling his youth with the imagination of the 
 fight that was at hand. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Meanwhile, in the Weald, to the north of Lewes 
 Gap, on the clay of the Weald and in the oak-trees 
 of it, the determined, fanatical and motley army, 
 not an army of chivalry but of the rebellion, watched 
 all night and prayed to God. 
 
 They made their confessions to the numerous 
 priests, many of them wandering priests who 
 followed the army ; they knelt by torches and 
 received the absolution of the Bishop who had 
 joined the host ; few slept and with this singular, 
 unmilitary preparation the " Army of the Cause 
 of Heaven " braced themselves through the dark- 
 ness to meet the adventure and the strain of the 
 morrow. There were many men there paid to 
 come, many who had come from calculation, but 
 many more from enthusiasm ; there were squires of 
 the north, to whom the dialects of middle England 
 
 i
 
 130 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and of the south were even more unfamiliar than 
 the French which they stammered now and then 
 in the attempt to show that they were gentlemen. 
 There were a great mass of Londoners, thousands 
 upon thousands, held in a loose discipline by their 
 wealthier fellow citizens ; there were peasants 
 drawn from every county between Trent and 
 Thames ; and apart, governing all, were the Barons, 
 contemptuous of any tongue but their own, and 
 exchanging but rarely as they moved in the crowd 
 at night those phrases which, six miles away in 
 Lewes, men also of their rank were exchanging : 
 the pure northern French of civilisation and of the 
 Crusades. But the man who gave them all one 
 soul, and in whose mystical and exaggerated mind 
 their confused aspirations took form and lived, 
 De Montfort, was not seen until the day began to 
 dawn. 
 
 When the day dawned upon those Ides of May, 
 and the thatched roofs of Fletching could be dis- 
 tinguished by the armed men camping in the village 
 streets, the keen air was bitter with the bitterness 
 that belongs to these underparts of the Weald. 
 A white frost lay over the sodden meadow, and it 
 still showed white under the beginnings of the day, 
 which still struggled against the slanting rays of 
 the moon ; for the moon had not yet set, though
 
 THE ARMIES BEFORE LEWES 131 
 
 every moment she became paler and paler above 
 Ditchling and the Downs to the west. In that 
 mixed light the leader appeared and rode amongst 
 them. 
 
 He was the first to be mounted, and all the hour 
 of ordering was his own work amongst the many 
 thousands. He was armoured, in spite of the 
 length of the march before him : he trusted none 
 but himself ; two men from the Perigord, his 
 squires, rode behind him, but dared not speak. 
 He gave separate and personal commands to the 
 heads of the loose companies. Now and then, as 
 must always be the fashion of great commanders, he 
 turned abruptly to rate some common man whom 
 he saw ill-accoutred. The common man would 
 tremble, but could only partly understand, for he 
 had but a partial community of tongue with this 
 great lord. 
 
 De Montfort went slowly along the whole length 
 of that two miles of men before he allowed a saddled 
 horse to go forward or a company to turn and form. 
 He was careful to distinguish that the white cross 
 was sewn upon breast and shoulder ; he found one 
 man staggering under what was left in him of the 
 night's beer, and had him sent back to the baggage- 
 train. He struck another that had ventured out 
 of the rough line. He sat erect and firm, though
 
 182 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 he had not yet eaten (for he had communicated but 
 the moment before taking horse) ; only an occa- 
 sional shifting of his foot in the stirrup betrayed 
 the weakness of his broken leg, now healed. 
 
 Though the sun had not yet risen, it was broad 
 day, and the trees were full of birds, when at last 
 he had surveyed the whole, given command, and 
 permitted the head of the column to move. He 
 kept in one place, facing the host as it filed past, 
 impressing, as it were, physically upon the multitude 
 the hard face, the pale eye, the spare and disciplined 
 figure of the fanatic. When the last of the column 
 had passed he glanced back at his waggons, saw 
 them massed, and left them standing on the village 
 green, then, and only when a picked company for 
 a rear-guard had gone by and left him alone with 
 his two squires of the Perigord, did he bless himself 
 with his right hand and canter up the line. 
 
 Twice he let his horse fall to a walk ; the first 
 time as he passed the slingers, whose exactitude 
 and vigour were his pride as he saw them his own 
 rigid face half smiled, the mouth at least, but not 
 the eyes ; the second time, when, after he had 
 overtaken the interminable and straggling rank of 
 the Londoners, he came up level with the mounted 
 knights who were their leaders, and spoke to Se- 
 grave, for Segrave knew the dialect of the town
 
 THE ARMIES BEFORE LEWES 133 
 
 and could report upon the spirit of that contingent 
 which he commanded, and he said that though they 
 looked unsoldierly (for they were fat burgesses, 
 apprentices and lounging riverside men) he would 
 go bail for their spirit when it came to action. 
 De Montfort answered neither yes nor no, but he 
 cantered on up the line, till he came at its head 
 to the wicker carriage closed in with a wicker roof 
 and shut with a wicker door that had borne him 
 while his leg was healing. This thing his intense, 
 feverish and superstitious mind had endowed with 
 a sort of sanctity. Herein he kept bound four 
 prisoners of his, rich men of London who had 
 refused to follow his command; and alongside of 
 it was lashed an enormous long fir-pole, and in a 
 bundle beside it the Banner of the Cross and of 
 Almighty God, which he purposed to set up before 
 battle upon the very height of the Downs. 
 
 These stood dark, solemn, and, as it were, ap- 
 pealing, a little way before him ; not a barrier, 
 but rather a pompous ascent provided for him and a 
 platform for glorious occasion. He went on, silent, 
 ahead of the army, gazing at the challenge, or 
 rather the invitation of those great hills of grass 
 that were surely created for a good cavalry captain 
 to use, and with every slow length of his approach 
 towards them, that inspired and prophetic con-
 
 134 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 fidence of success which inflamed Simon De Montfort 
 with enthusiasm whether before victory or defeat, 
 swelled his spirit. 
 
 It was in this mood that he crossed the sunken 
 road that has fringed the foot of the range since 
 men first began to wander over Sussex land, and 
 in this mood that he reined in his horse again and 
 drew it somewhat aside in order that he might 
 watch his great command begin the collar work 
 of breasting the steep slope of the Combe. 
 
 What order he made, with what a vision he 
 filled his four battalions, what fate they had, and 
 how the action was decided I shall next describe.
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 
 
 MAY 14, 1264 
 
 On May 14, 1264, Simon de Montfort, his rebel Barons and 
 their allies from London, though losing the left of their battle in 
 the Downs above Lewes, were successful upon their right and so 
 gained the day, talcing prisoner the King himself. In this 
 way the nobles and the wealthy of London, who had already par- 
 tially succeeded against John and had obtained from him the 
 signing of Magna Charta, laid a foundation for what was 
 much later to become the aristocratic constitution of England
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 
 
 MAY 14, 1264 
 
 nPHE windows of the Castle of Lewes look south 
 -*- and east over the town, north and west over 
 that broad upland plain which stretches on to a 
 rounded summit and is called Mount Harry. 
 
 At one of these Prince Edward stood with the 
 Luzignan. Soldiers in command are either occu- 
 pied beyond all bearing or quite at leisure, and 
 these two had been at leisure for some hours. They 
 had heard Mass at dawn in the dark chapel ; they 
 had wandered together into the courtyard, and had 
 thought of riding into the open. Their rank for- 
 bade what each of them desired, which was to spend 
 an empty day in and out of the narrow streets of 
 the town, listening to the people. 
 
 It was still early morning, but some hours had 
 passed since that summer daybreak as these two 
 leaned at the very deep, rounded window and gazed 
 beyond the shadow of the Castle at the large sward 
 rising to the west and north. 
 
 Here the best mounts of the lords were grazing, 
 
 137
 
 138 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and their valets stood by with each upon a longe, 
 seeing that none should escape ; they were heavy 
 horses, large, short legs, big barrels, and nothing 
 lively about them but the eye, for they were used 
 to war. As the princes so looked, awaiting one 
 more day of foolish leisure, they saw long, thin 
 lines of lifted spears rising like a wood of winter 
 larches over the summit of Mount Harry ; three 
 moving lines of men, spread over a mile of ground, 
 jerked over the crest of the hill. Their movement 
 was not rapid, but it was regular. They were 
 distant much more than a mile, and yet, showing 
 thus against the sky-line and separated by the 
 clearly denned gaps between the three batailles, 
 they had about them both order and menace. 
 
 At once the Castle awoke. The princes, as they 
 heard the clamour, saw from their window the 
 valets catching at the horses' manes, vaulting on to 
 their broad backs, and galloping heavily, but with 
 all the speed they could, towards the narrow port- 
 way upon the wall. It was like a race (for only 
 one could pass through that gate at a time). They 
 clustered outside of it and then filed in as quickly 
 as they could, each couple jostling for precedenc2 
 at the edge of the drawbridge. 
 
 The first thing in the minds of the princes was a 
 wonder about the scouts, but these had deserted
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 139 
 
 their posts far up upon the Downs, and one man 
 only, who had been left to give warning to the guard, 
 had been caught and silenced by the enemy when 
 they had found him shivering under his gorse-bush 
 at dawn on the edge of the Combe. The second 
 thought, since they were soldiers, was this that a 
 rapid advance might pen them within the town. 
 That advance was never made. The army of 
 Simon de Montfort had not a sufficient discipline 
 for rapidity ; its morale demanded prayers and 
 omens as a matter of calculation ; not only for the 
 army but for Simon de Montfort's temperament 
 also prayers and omens were a matter of course, 
 and that long line halted up there upon the hill-top 
 above the town kneeling and watching a quaint 
 ceremony of knighthood before they slowly went 
 to their positions. 
 
 When, therefore, Prince Edward, the first of his 
 command, had ridden out, equipped, through the 
 drawbridge, the line of the enemy was still so far 
 that you could not see the face of a man nor dis- 
 tinguish anything except the mounted from the 
 unmounted men, and, fringing each division but 
 much heavier upon the left than the right, the 
 parallel poles of the spears. 
 
 Prince Edward rode out, and with him the 
 Luzignan. A very long file of cavalry followed ; the
 
 140 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 infantry of his command he neglected, depending 
 entirely upon the charge. The enemy gave him 
 full time to deploy ; the horses stood in rank, and 
 shield after coloured shield made a pattern all 
 along the line of the wall. Prince Edward looked 
 to the left and saw, far away, down towards the 
 Priory, men issuing as had his command, and 
 deploying as his command had done. They were 
 his father's men, and his uncle of Allemaigne's ; 
 they also formed two great, dense lines of cavalry, 
 so that at last three bodies, strung the whole length 
 of the western wall of Lewes, awaited the advance 
 of the Barons. For this formation the enemy, yet 
 halting, gave them ample time. Behind the three 
 groups of the enemy, a fourth, many of its units 
 dismounted and all in repose, stood as a kind of 
 reserve. 
 
 If it had been intended to await battle in this 
 position, and to let the royal army charge uphill 
 against an orderly defence, the plan was broken 
 by the rebel army's left, which stood over against 
 Prince Edward and the Castle force. These were the 
 Londoners, and while they thus stood opposite the 
 best of the royal cavalry, they themselves counted 
 but few knights, and these rode, few and somewhat 
 uncertain, at the head of a great mass of foot- 
 soldiers, fifteen thousand or more ; the knights
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 141 
 
 attempted to establish a regularity of formation 
 for which civilians, such as their followers were, 
 had no aptitude or training. But though the 
 Londoners had neither, they had zeal, which is the 
 mother of disaster, and as they moved under that 
 morning the first movement in the long hesitation 
 before the shock it was difficult to say whether 
 the untutored mass overwhelmed its mounted 
 captains or whether these were leading it ; the 
 horses at first shambled heavily ; the infantry 
 behind were at a slow trot. For their lack of order 
 the footmen made up by cries. 
 
 As this strange initiative proceeded, the opposing 
 forces on the left still maintained an exact dis- 
 cipline and stood at arms, but the gathering rush 
 of the Londoners proceeded. Prince Edward's 
 line of armoured knights, which stood to receive it, 
 did not move. The unwieldy mass gained impetus, 
 accelerated its movement, the leading horses broke 
 into a canter, into a gallop, their riders bent for- 
 ward, behind them the 15,000 began to straggle 
 out in a sort of wedge where the faster outran the 
 less fast, and then, when perhaps two longbow 
 shots separated Prince Edward from the apex of 
 that noisy stream, he bent forward, looked along 
 the line, and gave a cry which every one who had 
 fought beneath Rochester knew.
 
 142 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 There is a way in which a horse springs forward 
 to the spur from immobility ; in this way not one 
 but several thousand sprang together. The line 
 of cavalry swept in a crescent like a scimitar over 
 the short grass, belly to ground, every man's sword 
 held out low down to the right of his mount, and 
 every helm just showing above the edge of the 
 shield on the rein-arm, and at once the shock was 
 joined. The few knights at the head of this London 
 mob were struck and reeled ; one, Hastings, turned 
 before the horses met, whether at the horse's will 
 or his own it was for his friends or his detractors to 
 determine ; it careered out of action, over the 
 hill. Segrave and the rest were pressed into a mass 
 of struggling footmen, in which the swords of 
 Edward's command made a massacre for a moment 
 or so ; then the whole force of the Londoners broke 
 into a dust of panic, and tore, each man at his 
 speed, up the slope of the hill. 
 
 It is in the character of such a rout that men 
 flying afoot do the worst for themselves. The 
 mounted knights, who a moment before had been 
 galloping at the head of that wedge of Londoners, 
 still fought and still controlled their broken for- 
 mation. They got them down the steep bank to 
 the right upon the Offham Road, where the mass of 
 the enemy's cavalry could hardly pursue, but the
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 143 
 
 unmounted Londoners ran anyhow and blind up 
 the slope of the hill, panting and suffering slaughter, 
 and after them, now gathering to strike, now 
 shepherding in from the flanks, now halting a 
 moment to re-form and then again charging at a 
 word, Edward's command pursued. 
 
 Those first seconds before the shock had seemed 
 long, perhaps, to either of the combatants, but the 
 pursuit, though long, seemed short. For an hour 
 and for two hours this interrupted galloping and 
 murder continued, until at last a remnant of the 
 Londoners had got off into the woods upon the 
 escarpment of the Downs, a larger number were 
 dragged, prisoners, by valets behind the cavalry, 
 but the most lay wounded and dead all along that 
 stretch of smooth, grassy land where now is the 
 down-hill of the racecourse as you look at it from 
 the Castle of Lewes. 
 
 A bunch of cavalry returned, their horses white 
 with sweat, their riders heavy with fatigue, from 
 an attack upon the chariot at the summit of the 
 hill, where De Montfort's banner flapped vigorously 
 from its high pole. They had failed to find their 
 quarry. Edward also drew rein, and saw Luzignan 
 a little way off halting as he did ; he was drawing 
 the leather palm of his glove, where no mail was, 
 over the sweat of his forehead beneath the helm.
 
 144 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 Edward turned his very tired and slightly wounded 
 horse towards that spot, and cried to him : " Midi 
 chauffe ! beau sire ! " But it was long past noon. 
 They halted thus for a moment, irresolute ; they 
 looked round and saw that the command was whole ; 
 there was nothing more to kill, to capture, or to 
 destroy ; they went back down the hill slowly all 
 together, and each wondered whether elsewhere 
 the action had been engaged. 
 
 Before them, upon this return toward Lewes, the 
 round Down made a horizon beyond which was 
 nothing but the blue height of Firle Beacon and 
 Mount Caburn nearer by, with white clouds in the 
 May sky, and a sunlight now growing mellow. They 
 bore to the right in anxiety, hearing no clamour of 
 pursuit nor any sign of victory in the further wing. 
 Next, as they descended, the tower of the Priory 
 peeped above that horizon, and in a little while 
 the whole of the sloping glacis in front of Lewes 
 wall was again before them. Here, again, Prince 
 Edward halted at the head of his command ; he 
 saw upon that plain sparse figures lying, an old 
 black windmill with a group of the enemy round 
 it, and a blazoned cloth hung from a window of 
 it as though to summon help, while all along 
 the wall of the town long troops of men gathered 
 and poured towards the gates, but they seemed
 
 THE BATTLE OF LEWES 145 
 
 to have no opponents. He began to under- 
 stand. 
 
 He sent a man forward towards the mill as near 
 as he might dare go, and when that messenger 
 returned he learned that the blazon was the blazon 
 of Allemaigne ; he saw from the height of the 
 Priory the red dragon of Wessex and of the Pen- 
 dragonship which had been his father's banner, 
 and he knew that he had missed the fight, that his 
 uncle was caught in the mill, that the King, his 
 father, was caught behind those Priory walls, that 
 the men pressing against the gate of the city were 
 Montfort's men. 
 
 In those few hours of his fury the main action 
 had been tried and lost, and the cause of the 
 Crown had been thrown away.
 
 CRESSY 
 
 AUGUST 26, 1346 
 
 Upon August 26, 1346, Edward III., retreating with some 
 twenty-five thousand men or less upon the sea after a 
 successful raid in Northern France, was caught up by the 
 French King, in pursuit, at Cressy (the French Crtey), in 
 Ponthieu. He beat off this host, quite four times his own * 
 number, with complete success
 
 CRESSY 
 
 AUGUST 26, 1346 
 
 IT was Saturday, August 26, in the year 1346. 
 The weather was stormy at the turn of the 
 year, but with intervals of mellow and warm sun- 
 light between. The vast host, in a sort of medley of 
 camp-followers, of peasants mixed in with fighting 
 men, of local guides and of hired soldiers from 
 Geneva, concentrated irregularly by many roads 
 up from the South and from the waters of the 
 Somme. 
 
 The march in general had been fatiguing and 
 long ; there was no unity of command, the con- 
 centration was ill-effected, when those who first 
 came to the brow and beyond a little wood which 
 flanks the Roman Road that great Roman Road 
 from Amiens to Boulogne, where some remnant of 
 a paving still showed and where was to be found 
 the best of the bad going in that time saw right 
 before them the disciplined array of the invaders. 
 
 It was a new sight for them. The little army 
 of Edward, carefully marshalled under its squires, 
 
 149
 
 150 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 had moved untouched and with soldierly rapidity 
 right up the Seine, doubling back in Normandy, 
 then with a sort of swoop on to Picardy. They 
 had meant to catch it against the estuary of the 
 Somme the day before, but a local traitor had 
 been bought and had shown Edward an old hard- 
 way across the estuary at low tide ; the invaders 
 had beaten back the detachment sent to resist 
 them upon the further side. It was upon the day 
 before, the Friday, that these things had been 
 done, and the force from overseas had marched 
 through the forest and on into the little town of 
 Cressy, going through the countrysides which were 
 the dowry of Edward's own mother, and coming 
 upon places and names which her infamous wars 
 had rendered familiar in the rent-rolls of her revenue 
 and in the lordships of her supporters. 
 
 It was already past noon when this sight was 
 seen by the mixed hundred thousand of the Valois, 
 and that King noted how little remained of the day 
 after so long and wearying and disordered a march 
 suffered by his four straggling columns ; yet the 
 King of France did not deploy, whether because 
 he could not from a lack of unison in his forces or 
 from the most imperfect synchrony of the various 
 bodies he nominally commanded, or for some other 
 reason, of haste, anger, bewilderment or despair,
 
 CRESSY 151 
 
 or fatigue, the mass of the host still lay huddled 
 in long streaming lines, the heads of which alone 
 debouched upon the field of battle. 
 
 That field had been chosen with such skill as 
 crowned the opponent of the Valois with genius ; 
 nor could any soldier about to enter the conflict 
 disregard it. It was a shallow roll of land (how 
 many such in Europe have seen the frenzy of great 
 defeats !). There was not in it one yard of dead 
 ground, but bare, burnt fields dipping some fifty 
 feet in half a mile, and then, beyond the gentle 
 hollow, rising again somewhat more steeply to the 
 low crest beyond. There ran a road by which every 
 communication was easy along the fighting line 
 and behind that road a level plateau in good cover 
 and suitable for the reserves. In the midst of the 
 crest three windmills broke the skyline. In the 
 largest and most central, which was solidly built 
 and of stone, Edward himself took up his place to 
 watch the battle. He was in green picked out 
 with gold, on foot and unarmoured, and he bore 
 in his hand not a sword but a white wand. He 
 was a young man full of fire, and down on the 
 steepest of the slope below him and to the right his 
 eldest son, a smooth-faced boy, all armoured in 
 dark steel, rode in the midst of French and English 
 squires, the vassals of his father.
 
 152 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 The time drew on, and yet no movement was 
 made. The stragglers of the French still kept 
 coming in. The soldierly forces of Edward, few, 
 compact, exact, rose up from where they had been 
 lying at rest upon the stubble, formed and made 
 ready, every man stretching his bow. Upon such 
 discipline and order the success ^of a retreat de- 
 pends, and here in this retreat there was to be asked 
 of them as sharp a covering action and as anxious a 
 resistance as could be well asked of any small army 
 caught, in its rapid fall backward, upon the sea. 
 How great and how tense was the anxiety of that 
 hour no record remains, for it was forgotten or 
 swallowed up in what followed. 
 
 The afternoon had far advanced, the sun already 
 stood behind the triple line upon the crest of the 
 fields of Cressy a triple line all excellently de- 
 ployed, rightly ordered, and framed with a sufficient 
 officering at every interval when there came 
 ominously up from the northward and blocking 
 out the sun the advance of a broad stormcloud. 
 Its shadow fell first upon the English King and his 
 little invading army, it swept across the deserted 
 hollow between the two enemies, it engulfed the 
 unready herd at the summit of the further slope, 
 and as it moved there went before it in the sky a 
 great bird drove of rooks cawing loudly before the
 
 CRESSY 153 
 
 tempest. When this cloud had already veiled the 
 sun and made in men's eyes a darkness as un- 
 natural as eclipse, there fell a torrent of rain 
 beating and blinding in the face of the Valois mob, 
 and of all the great lords who had come in such 
 disorder to conduct it after their fashion, and 
 against the hirelings from Geneva, who carried on 
 their shoulders the complex and heavy cross-bow 
 of their trade. It rained thus blindingly for the 
 little while that a summer storm can last ; the 
 landscape was blotted out and the earth, dry and 
 bare after harvest, splashed and sputtered, under 
 the rage of the rain. It had soon passed, the sun 
 shone again upon the drenched fields, and the 
 army of Edward reappeared in the same order and 
 still awaiting upon the defensive the action of the 
 enemy. Then it was, too late, that the French 
 King ordered the charge. Not with the horsemen ; 
 these would keep their place or advance, but slowly 
 down the gentle slope before them ; the Genevese 
 should go first, come into bow-shot and shake the 
 opposing infantry before his chivalry was un- 
 leashed to gallop and drive them down. In a long 
 wavering line, parallel to the irregular front of the 
 French host, the Genevese went forward, crossed 
 the valley and began to rise upon the opposing side. 
 They halted three times for a moment to give their
 
 154 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 cry, they painfully wound up the strings of their 
 cross-bows, bending to the task, and then at a full 
 range discharged their volley of quarrels upon the 
 triple line immediately above and before them, 
 and all the while the horsemen, half a mile behind, 
 walked at a pace ready to charge when that volley 
 should be delivered. But hardly had the noise of 
 the quarrels come back upon the wind, humming 
 in their weighty flight, when another slighter and 
 keener noise succeeded to it, and the air was thick 
 in the midst of the Genevese line and behind it, 
 with the little white plumes of the yard-long arrows 
 that had come at the right and chosen moment 
 with exact aim at a range not expected and with the 
 precision that only long drill and habit can produce, 
 cutting through the advance line of the cross- 
 bowmen ; these began in their long, open order to 
 flinch here and there ; for one man hurriedly 
 rewinding his machine would be another struck, 
 another cowering, another, that had flung his 
 instrument down, flying out of range before the 
 next volley of the yard-long arrows should sing. 
 The need was immediate ; the French lords and 
 their King, cursing the Genevese, charged suddenly. 
 It was the last of the great unquestioned charges 
 which from Iconium to this day had decided 
 the warfare of Christendom. Twenty accidents
 
 CRESSY 155 
 
 made it fail, and in its failure drag down the 
 strength of the kingdom. The earth, still sodden, 
 clogged it ; the forces bunched, inaccurately 
 divided going without one command, men pressing 
 forward from the rear to be in with the gallop and 
 to strike a blow ; the broken, the flying, and the 
 disordered Genevese were so many obstacles upon 
 which the big horses should stumble, and for every 
 horse so stumbling, or falling, a man, weighted 
 with 5 st. of iron, fell and yet more impeded his 
 fellows crowding from behind. The front, irregular 
 even at the onset, was hopelessly broken, was lost. 
 Here and there an individual tore up the hill, 
 escaped from the crush ; such did but afford an 
 easier mark for the new volley. For right into 
 that welter came the second discharge of the 
 arrows, murderously catching the horses in neck 
 and shoulder and under the mailed frontals and 
 the legs, bringing them down, and men also some- 
 times, in the joints of the armour. Above the 
 noise of falling metal and the shouting came now 
 and then a sound more novel : the boom of little 
 guns. The whole mile of confused riding eddied 
 and whirled. It neither desired to nor could it 
 retreat ; but, upon it thus checked, the mass of its 
 own followers, pages and peasants, and footmen, 
 swarmed, intending to aid but not aiding, and
 
 156 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 again, and once more, there poured into it the exact 
 and disciplined arrows. Nowhere did any number 
 of the charging swords get home together upon the 
 crest by the high road, and Edward, watching 
 from his mill, could see his triple line unbroken 
 everywhere, and below it all down the slope his 
 enemy rolled in confusion. 
 
 Only upon the right, where there is steeper 
 ground, had the forces plainly met, and there his 
 son, the boy, and those around him, were pressed 
 for some little time in a meUe. But soon, though 
 they had sent for aid and he had given none, he 
 could see them pressing forward. Here alone did 
 the English line advance, and here in the last rally 
 of the French forces the blind King of Bohemia 
 when this English advance upon the right had 
 already turned the carnage of the main line 
 charged in a hopeless, single sort of fashion with- 
 out hope of success or reward, his bridle tied to 
 other bridles, hungry only to strike, and, of course, 
 was killed. The King also would have attempted 
 (for he had survived) some last, useless, blind and 
 furious thing, but his gentlemen forced him back 
 outward and away from the field, and he rode and 
 rode and rode until late that evening he knocked 
 at the door of a great abbey in a wood, and when 
 the monks' porter called through the little wicket,
 
 CRESSY 157 
 
 " Who knocks here ? " the Valois answered in a 
 despairing way and loudly, " The Fortune of 
 France." 
 
 As that evening fell upon the little hollow in 
 front of Cressy town many men went about with 
 lanterns killing or ransoming the wounded, peer- 
 ing at the armouries of the dead, and noting the 
 names of the great lords. There were many 
 thousands lying thus, pinned in their armour among 
 the slain and wounded horses and gathered like a 
 harvest by the victors. Next day they buried the 
 dead, they gathered spoil, they burnt wreckage, 
 they heard mass for the souls of the fallen. With 
 the Monday the twenty thousand, full of victory, 
 resumed their march back upon the sea. 
 
 In this way was fought the chief and the most 
 complete of the many great actions which have 
 covered the retreat of an army.
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV. 
 
 MARCH 19, 1413 
 
 On March 19 (or 20), 1413, Henry IV., who had usurped the 
 Crown by treason from his cousin Richard, fourteen years before, 
 died in the Abbot's Chamber at Westminster. He was pre- 
 maturely aged, afflicted with a horrible disease and suffering 
 from epileptic fits, the last of which seized him as he prayed, on 
 March 19, at King Edward's shrine in the Abbey. In his 
 time, and just before it, the division between poor and rich had 
 been violent ; religious visionaries had accentuated this feeling 
 and mixed it with Messianic, Apocalyptical and Mystical solu- 
 tions of social problems. Also in his time and thence onward 
 the official suppression of philosophical discussion became 
 traditional. In one contemporary account sailors boasted 
 that his body, on its way to funeral, had been thrown over- 
 board
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV. 
 
 MARCH 19, 1413 
 
 rilWO men, sweeping a kennel that ran between 
 *- St. Stephen's and the vast apse of the Abbey 
 on a March morning, saw the King go by. 
 
 He was in a litter, and the curtains were drawn 
 to shield him from the bold wind, but where they 
 hung loosely by the pole at the corner they could 
 just see a face upon a pillow. It was an awful face, 
 red, made hideous by disease, and the hair and the 
 ruin of expression were those of an old man. The 
 carriers took it by quickly, and round by the little 
 gate that was there into the South Transept, and 
 as it passed through, one of the men made the sign 
 of the Cross and looked frightened, the other, who 
 was younger, laughed at him. Neither of them 
 was full grown when was the great betrayal of 
 King Richard, but they were full of the tradition 
 of the common people, knowing very well that 
 usurpation and the denial of right and Parliaments 
 and the rest were good for great lords but evil 
 for God's flock. So they went on sweeping the 
 
 161 L
 
 162 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 kennel, the March wind howled down the alley 
 and whistled past the splendid buttresses of the 
 Abbey. Very high up in the pure air, in the 
 narrow strip of sky between the high walls of the 
 Palace and of the Minster, birds were wheeling and 
 poising themselves against the wind. 
 
 The elder sweeper said to the younger after a 
 little (first looking round to see that no master 
 could watch him ceasing from his labour) : 
 *' Parson Tylle will have at him to-day ! " and he 
 chuckled. " Would God poor priests would never 
 shrive great lords ! " 
 
 The younger man said that come good, come ill 
 to great lords, it was always ill for God's flock, and 
 that for his part all parsons were one to him, and 
 he believed not a word they told him. Having 
 sworn to this by the Mother of God, he went on 
 sweeping. 
 
 But, inside the South Transept, where it was 
 much warmer and quite silent and dark, the King 
 lay for awhile in his litter and groaned ; then he 
 bade them take him forward again whither he had 
 to go. But just as the four men laid hold of the 
 handles and the man-at-arms struck the tombs 
 beneath with his staff, and as the King within 
 groaned at the pain any movement gave him, he 
 thought suddenly of another thing, and asked,
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV 163 
 
 as loudly as his disease and weakness would permit, 
 where, if anywhere, the Blessed Sacrament was 
 reserved that day. The man-at-arms walked 
 forward to look if there were a light, and coming 
 back he said it was reserved at the High Altar for 
 some purpose, although this was not a feast. 
 
 " Then," said Henry, " you shall not carry me 
 past, but I must pray." 
 
 So, when his litter was before the gate of the 
 Choir, they set him down again, and to the wonder 
 of one at least of his carriers, who was an up-country 
 man and to whom the custom was not known, the 
 King made a full obeisance to the ground. Then 
 he motioned them to bear him forward again and 
 groaned. So they took him till they came to the 
 shrine of King Edward. There he knelt as best 
 he could but with vast difficulty and prayed. 
 
 The fruits of life are eaten as they come ; they 
 had all of them passed from his hands ; the long 
 memory of examples neglected, the great tradition 
 of that shrine, a tradition h^ had despised, weighed 
 upon him and added a dreadful fervour to his 
 prayer. The most of it was a repetition of the set 
 forms in which he trusted, but through them there 
 ran in his mind one major note of appeal, insistent, 
 dominating all, that he might reach Jerusalem ; 
 for Death is never seen, however near. He had
 
 164 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 carefully hoarded gold : he had spared neither 
 himself nor others, nor the blood of -the poor in the 
 matter, nor their hunger, nor the position of great 
 princes. But he had still in the last months (he 
 implored his God to remember it) gathered gold 
 to gold, and all for that good work at Jerusalem ; 
 and in his agony he remembered the prophecy that 
 if God would not accept that offering nor permit 
 him to see the Tomb of the Lord, then it should 
 be a sign that his own soul was reprobate. The 
 great treason he had done and all that had sprung 
 from it his unknightly fear of the powerful, his 
 evil cruelty to whatever of the pack ran separate 
 from the rest, his ceaseless intrigue which had 
 destroyed all that fine youthful courage which he 
 had boasted in the saddle before he stooped to 
 betray all this, the ruin of his earthly honour, 
 would drag him down to Hell. 
 
 Even as he thus prayed in despair and yet in 
 supplication the attitude overcame him. The 
 disturbance of his posture affected his sense, his 
 head swam, and he was falling when his servants 
 ran and caught him as he fell. They took him 
 quite unconscious into the Abbot's rooms. There, 
 after some hours, he opened his eyes and found 
 the world again, and knew that his doom had not 
 yet come.
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV. 165 
 
 They had sent for his confessor while he lay in 
 that fit, and the man was there, Parson Tylle, full 
 of his duty, and, like a true cleric, alone possessing 
 the courage to approach the repulsive figure. It 
 was appalling not so much from the horrible con- 
 dition of the skin as from that contrast which, 
 thank Heaven, is but rarely seen between the 
 externals of age and the absence of maturity in 
 the soul ; for though Henry was far from fifty, 
 nay, but forty-five, the hands, the forehead, the 
 eyes, and all the rest were those of a man broken 
 by the last process of years. 
 
 His confessor still urged him, and he was willing 
 to repent. In what remained of his voice he gave 
 just counsels for his son and for the new reign ; but 
 in the matter of his chief crime he saw no issue, and 
 to every admonition that he should make reparation 
 he could only find the answer that reparation was 
 not in his power. The thing had struck root and 
 was beyond him. He left it to his lineage. And 
 he saw that for his part he was willing, but that 
 his lineage would not bear the abandonment of 
 the Crown. Whether, as dying men may do, he 
 saw how that treason, which had taken root, 
 would bear other blossom in the end madness and 
 loss of empire, defeat, civil war, and, at last, the 
 extinction of his House there is no record. He
 
 166 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 lay there, confessed as to what he could confess, 
 and absolved in such things as they had the power 
 to absolve him in, and still regretting Jerusalem. 
 His weakness increased very quickly, and in a 
 little while he died. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 They would bury him in Canterbury, not at 
 Windsor, which was too kingly ; not here in 
 Westminster, where he had forbidden the King, 
 his cousin, whom he had despoiled and murdered, 
 to lie. 
 
 To take the body to Canterbury they put it 
 aboard ship in the Thames, and the master, waiting 
 for the turn of the tide, dropped down at last by 
 night, having lashed upon his decks, with other 
 cargo, the first of the Lancastrians. 
 
 But when they got to where the river broadens 
 and a vessel first feels the lump coming in from the 
 Swin, the wind freshened, the sea rose, the flood 
 was now against them. The master was in peril, 
 he and his crew and men in peril at sea have a 
 fear of the dead. 
 
 When, therefore, many hours later they had 
 safely landed and the coffin had been borne with 
 great pomp to be lain under the protection of St. 
 Thomas ; and when, after the ceremonial, the 
 townspeople went off to drink together, one man
 
 THE END OF HENRY IV. 167 
 
 of that cathedral city took with him to drink at the 
 " Keys " a sailor whom he knew, and whose con- 
 versation he hoped would raise him in the esteem 
 of his fellows at the board that evening, for the 
 sailor had been one of the crew that had brought 
 by water the body of the King. 
 
 They drank all together, these two companions 
 and those that had gathered round, and when they 
 were full of ale, and had become bold with it and 
 had sung some songs, and when evening had 
 fallen, the sailor saw fit to tell them this tale : 
 That in the gale of the night (they all remembered 
 the gale ? ) he and certain companions, whose 
 names he dared not give, had lightened the ship 
 lest it should founder ; they had not lightened it 
 of lead nor of iron, nor of any part of the cargo, 
 but they had lightened it secretly of an evil thing 
 they had jettisoned the 'body of the King.
 
 THE FAMILIAR 
 
 MAY 1588 
 
 In the second week of May 1588 the fleet of transports (the 
 Armada) which were to sail from Spain and to carry troops 
 from the Netherlands to invade England, lay ready in the 
 Tagus. In whai follows is imagined a scene in the Royal Palace 
 at Madrid where council is held as to the date of sailing
 
 THE FAMILIAR 
 
 MAY 1588 
 
 AMONG those who advised the Court of Madrid 
 under Philip II. was a man of singular 
 temper, already elderly, a noble, but of the meaner 
 sort, very proud, poor and trusted by but a few. 
 Nevertheless the King would continually send for 
 his adviser, and he was called "The Familiar." 
 It was now many years gone by when he was 
 secretary to a rather fatuous cousin of his, a 
 bishop a debate with regard to the irrigation of 
 the Valley of Daroca, where the Crown had lands, 
 arose, and he had maintained against all expert 
 opinion that a certain dam would not hold, and 
 in fact the dam broke the week after. From this 
 he passed to many other instances of judgment, 
 giving no reasons for his conclusions and perhaps 
 having none ; but once and again upon matters 
 more and more important, proving always so 
 inspired that men began to be a little afraid of 
 him. 
 
 When, therefore, the fixed determination of the 
 171
 
 172 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 King to send a fleet to transport troops from 
 Flanders against England had matured, and the 
 fleet was waiting in Lisbon Harbour to sail, he 
 could not but be summoned, to name the day 
 that would be lucky for setting out. His con- 
 clusion was simple enough. He would name no 
 date. He condemned the expedition altogether. 
 
 Upon a matter so important and so urgent, one 
 on which the Crown was so fixed, and one in which 
 such enormous money interest had already grown 
 up, his opposition did nothing but exasperate. 
 Nevertheless he maintained it, and he maintained 
 it against all reason. He stood respectfully enough 
 beside the Council Board (at which he had no 
 right to sit). He was dressed all in black, with 
 white lace at his throat and wrists. The splendour 
 of the room to which he had been summoned had 
 made his isolated figure the more outstanding ; 
 his erect posture before all that seated grandeur 
 singled him out for a little superstition, and very 
 much opposition. The fat cleric, his cousin, now 
 grown old and a Cardinal, looked at him over 
 his shoulder, called him by his Christian name, 
 and said : " Against the Government again ? " and 
 then chuckled. An old Duke on the opposite 
 side of the table with a heavy, avaricious face, a 
 man who stood to make five thousand more in the
 
 THE FAMILIAR 173 
 
 equipment of the transports, looked at him with 
 hatred, for he knew the power of the man's mere 
 pronouncements upon the keen and decisive, but 
 somewhat superstitious, imagination of the King- 
 The King, indeed, watched him with an expression 
 very different from that upon the face of any of his 
 councillors, for, while in some things he was much 
 superior to them all, he was quite different from 
 the type of mercantile nobility that served him. 
 He was above all a devoted man, and a very 
 soldierly one. Moreover there was between him 
 and his dark adviser, this Familiar, a very strong, 
 secret, and undefinable bond, partly of good 
 service rendered, but much more of a similarity in 
 character. For each was direct, each of rapid 
 judgment, each somewhat mournful. 
 
 The Familiar spoke again, shaking his head. 
 " I can only tell you what I have told you," he 
 said. " You have asked for my word and I have 
 given it." 
 
 A sailor there present, a very refined, feminine 
 sort of man, lolling back in his great chair of state, 
 said in a delicate ironical voice : " Have you so 
 much as seen the sea ? 
 
 The Familiar coloured a little ; he had not. 
 Many laughed, till Philip looked up sternly ; then 
 leaning forward himself over the table, in an
 
 174 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 earnest way, and giving this stranger fellow all 
 his titles with great courtesy, he said : " Tell me, 
 the King, as you have told me before, as you told 
 me in the matter of my marriage there, whether 
 it is indeed your fixed opinion." 
 
 The stranger did not raise his head ; he answered 
 in a very low voice : "I cannot but repeat it." 
 Philip sighed and leant backwards, with a hand 
 on either arm of his throne. A cleric who had been 
 his tutor, and who had survived to be present at 
 these Councils of State, stood up, and begged leave 
 to speak. The King nodded to him, and he began : 
 
 " I have always spoken clearly since your child- 
 hood, and you are too great to be angered by what 
 I shall say ; which is, that the dignity of your 
 realm, and of your possession half the world, as I 
 may say, in numbers, and much more than half 
 the world in glory forbid you, or should forbid 
 you, from indulgence of this kind. All is plainly 
 known, the nature of the campaign, our policy upon 
 the issue of that campaign and the necessity for it. 
 If it is ill policy for the strong to attack the very 
 weak and it is so in general yet there are times 
 when this inglorious thing must be done. How- 
 ever contemptible one's opponent, a people civilised 
 and great, whose mission under God it is to bring 
 order and peace to the Christian world, cannot put
 
 THE FAMILIAR 175 
 
 up with petty piracy, striking at and disturbing 
 our vast and settled commerce, and unsupported, 
 remember, by any Prince in Europe. And I would 
 implore you, with what authority I have, to forget 
 altogether your weakness in the matter of this man, 
 to do at once what cannot be postponed for more 
 than a few days, and to sign the order." He sat 
 down. 
 
 " Admiral," said the King, " have you nothing 
 to say ? " The Admiral shrugged his shoulders. 
 *' I do not see what you can say in such a matter ; 
 everything is calculable ; we know the elements 
 of the affair ; there cannot be an appreciable 
 opposition, and we are all decided, twenty times, 
 that it is worth while. Whether it was worth 
 while was (but that was months ago) the only 
 question." 
 
 " How do they fight ? " said the King. 
 
 The sailor was interested at once. He put his 
 hands upon the table and went into details with 
 zeal. " They fight just as their character would 
 lead one to think ; they don't come close ; they are 
 astonishingly quick, and they love a light vessel. 
 They raid. They depend, as I suppose all pirates 
 do, on gun-fire. They carry ridiculously heavy 
 guns for their small boats. But the whole thing is 
 nagging and worrying, it isn't fighting. They
 
 176 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 have no formation ; it's every ship for itself. They 
 had something of formation under Henry, but 
 that's all gone. Their gun-fire's very good, but 
 there's no order about it. You can be certain 
 you will never have a converging fire from several 
 at once. The whole thing's random. . . . What 
 you would expect ! " 
 
 As he was talking thus the Cardinal and the old 
 Duke were each of them nodding gravely and with 
 approval, and the Cardinal spoke next without 
 leave. " You speak with professional knowledge, 
 Admiral " they bowed to each other " and we all 
 accept your expert conclusion " 
 
 The King interrupted sharply : " You mean, 
 Admiral, they can raid a harbour (as they have) or 
 harass stragglers, and would be quite incapable of a 
 fleet action or of seriously engaging a heavy line ? " 
 
 The Admiral smiled with a completely sincere 
 contempt, and waved the very suggestion away 
 with his hand. 
 
 "I was about to say," said the Cardinal more 
 pompously, " that what the Admiral has told us 
 thoroughly agrees with what we laymen know, 
 both those of us who, like myself, have done work 
 for the Empire in England which I did as a 
 younger man and those of us who know the place 
 only as students, or even by repute. The whole
 
 THE FAMILIAR 177 
 
 framework of their society has gone to pieces. 
 They are rotten through. No two men think 
 alike on the most urgent matters, their towns 
 decline, their population is falling. Much of their 
 land has passed to adventurers who waste it 
 openly. As for the bastard who pretends to rule 
 them, one cannot tell how few support her claim. 
 The whole thing is a terror, and even her creatures 
 are as much the slaves of fear as they are of avarice. 
 Nations fall sick and they recover, or the sickness 
 endures and they die. England is past praying 
 for. They have attempted here and there to rule 
 the heathen, which is the test of a people, and they 
 have failed ; they can nowhere fix their power 
 upon land outside their own boundaries ; they 
 have lost all tradition and respect ; the whole 
 thing is a welter ; it is a sort of ulcer to be cut out 
 of Europe. Dangerous only as a poison, not as an 
 armed enemy." 
 
 Then, looking at his cousin again over his 
 shoulder, he said : " You were with me just after 
 my return when Henry was alive, and you remember 
 my speaking of some sort of order. And then the 
 man had character ; I believe you are basing 
 yourself on that memory." The Familiar shook 
 his head. " Well, anyhow I believe that expe- 
 rience impressed you unconsciously ; everything 
 
 M
 
 178 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 has gone from bad to worse since. In Flanders 
 even then (we said) they had not much of an army 
 imagine their doing a thing like that to-day ! " 
 
 The Duke opposite leant back and laughed 
 heartily. 
 
 " Surely it is waste of time," he said. " You 
 can do nothing with a prophet. I can understand," 
 he added with serious hypocrisy, " a well-founded 
 objection on the financial side " (he bowed to the 
 Treasurer, who looked more solemn than ever, for 
 he was a fool), " but mere prophecy ! why, the 
 thing is actually done. It is only a question of 
 to-day, or to-morrow, or next week. And," he 
 added gravely, thinking of his five thousand, 
 " every day means money." 
 
 Philip looked up, but the man in black still stood 
 silent : " You can go," said the King. 
 
 The Familiar passed through the great carved 
 door of the room, and went down the marble stairs 
 into the blazing light of the courtyard. When he 
 had gone there was silence for a little while, and in 
 all, save the King, a feeling of relief, as though 
 something uncanny had been cleared from their 
 presence, so that they could breathe again. But 
 the King for a whole five minutes sat staring 
 before him with empty hands. The Cardinal 
 pushed a parchment towards him ; he came back
 
 THE FAMILIAR 179 
 
 from his reverie and signed it with the proud 
 formula of Spain : " I the King." 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 When Philip so signed a final Order in Council 
 the rule of that strict Court demanded that all 
 should rise and make obeisance to him. The 
 Council rose, the laymen with their hands upon the 
 hilt, the clerics with hands folded. He saluted 
 them and went out alone. When he had gone out 
 one looked slyly at another, and then there was a 
 general loud laugh, not very pleasing to the King's 
 old tutor, but hearty in all the rest. They rose 
 good-humouredly, joking together, and one of 
 them slyly tapped his forehead, but only so that 
 a very near friend could see him, and even that 
 friend reproved the gesture. 
 
 Upon May 19 or, as we should say, the 29th 
 the Armada sailed.
 
 THE "ARK-ROY ALL" 
 
 JULY 27 (OR, AS WE SHOULD SAY, AUGUST 7), 1588 
 
 The " Ark-Royall " was, during the struggle with the Armada, 
 the flagship of the English Lord Admiral, a landsman, one of 
 the Howards, a family recently grown very powerful through 
 the wealth taken from the Church
 
 THE " ARK-EOYALL " 
 
 JULY 27, 1588 
 
 THE Straits of Dover, when one approaches 
 them from the east, are like the mouth of a 
 great river, nor do they ever bear that aspect more 
 than at sunset, when, if one is in mid-stream and 
 the day has been clear, one sees quite close upon 
 either hand, not ten miles off each way, the high- 
 lands of either shore, those highlands branching 
 outwards till they are lost on the horizon as might 
 be lost the spreading highlands of an estuary. 
 
 If the stream be at the ebb the illusion is en- 
 hanced, for one sees the pouring out of the flood in 
 the way that a river should go ; it is then not 
 difficult to forget the North Sea behind one, and 
 to imagine, as one drifts down the mid-channel 
 towards the colour in the west, that one is still 
 embraced by the land and that one is only just now 
 setting out to sea. The sun broadens into a long 
 belt of haze before it touches the horizon, and the 
 light of it catches either line of cliffs. It seems a 
 very peaceful sea. 
 
 183
 
 184 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 July 27, 1588, was of this kind. The sun was 
 setting beyond the shoals of the Varne and all 
 the great roundell of Spanish ships were clustered 
 in a group from Grisnez eastward, coming up very 
 slowly against the tide ; they sailed above an easy 
 holding-ground not far from the French land. 
 The huge bulk of the transports, high forward and 
 astern, cast long shadows upon the calm ; it was 
 the merest breath of wind that carried the Armada 
 on, or rather, just held it against the strong coast- 
 wise stream. When the last of them and the 
 slowest had passed outside the shoals that cluster 
 under the steep of Grisnez the rattling of chains 
 began through the clear and silent air ; there were 
 signals both with bugle and with bunting, a gun 
 was fired, and the wide fleet dropped anchor in 
 fifteen fathom and rode, every ship with its bows 
 upstream and every high poop in the blaze of the 
 sunset. It was Saturday evening. All week long 
 they had crawled and beaten up the Channel, and 
 all week long the little English craft with their 
 much heavier artillery had stood the recoil of 
 their own great guns and had peppered the 
 enemy from well out of range ; and one ship 
 the Spaniards had lost by collision so that she 
 lagged and Drake caught her, full of gold, and 
 another a traitor had fired, and this also, or the
 
 THE " ARK-ROYALL " 185 
 
 charred hulk of it, had been towed into an 
 English harbour. 
 
 The Lord Admiral of England all that week had 
 followed in the Ark-Royall. He had followed them 
 by day and by night ; all the hours a man can see 
 to fire he ordered the intermittent cannonade, and 
 now upon this calm evening, with the northerly 
 breeze gone westward and dying down, he and his 
 came up between the Spaniards and the sun. 
 They also cast anchor just out of range, and from 
 beyond the Straits from round the North Foreland 
 came thirty more from London and joined the line. 
 
 It was soon dark. Long before midnight the 
 craft began to swing, the smaller English vessels 
 coming quickly round to the bubbling of the flood 
 tide as it swirled round Grisnez, the larger Spanish 
 transports catching the stream more slowly, but at 
 last turned also east and west to the change of the 
 sea, and with the turn of the tide the wind rose, 
 though at first but little, and blew steadily out of 
 the west and south in a gentle and constant manner, 
 and the sky clouded. The beacon upon Dover 
 cliff flickered far off to the west and the northward ; 
 one could see bonfires or the glare of them against 
 the sky of the Weald, and there were more lights 
 than usual passing up and down the English shore. 
 Upon the French, the tall Pharos of Calais alone
 
 186 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 shone over the marshy flats. Grisnez was a huge 
 lump against the darkness. But all the surface of 
 the sea was dotted with the lamps of the fleets and 
 the broken water was full of glints and reflections. 
 
 In Dunkirk, a very few miles up the shore, 
 waited that army which, if in any manner it could 
 have crossed the day's march of salt water, would 
 have raised the Catholic north of England, occupied 
 the indifferent south, and held London to the 
 complete reversal of the fate of Europe. Further 
 still up coast, at Nieuport, was their reserve. It was 
 midnight and past midnight ; the Sunday morning 
 had begun, and the wind, chopping a little north- 
 ward and uncertain, but in general a little south of 
 west, blew in gusts that soon joined to half a gale. 
 The sea rose, and along the line of the sand and 
 under the dark steep beyond, the long white line of 
 breakers was very clear through the darkness. 
 
 Aboard the Ark-Royall the Lord Admiral 
 Howard, the landsman, took counsel and did as 
 he was told. They took eight ships of the worst, 
 cleared them and stuffed them with all manner of 
 burnable and missile things, they put in barrels 
 of pitch and of powder, great stones and round 
 shot, beams of dry wood and slack cordage. They 
 warped them round in the difficulty and tossing of 
 that weather till they pointed up stream, and they
 
 THE " ARK-ROYALL " 187 
 
 set square sails on each that the wind should 
 catch them, so that with the gale and the flood 
 tide together they might bear down upon the 
 Spanish Fleet. These derelicts were held by 
 warps from the stern, and the sails so set strained 
 the warps too powerfully until the signal was 
 given. Then, with great despatch, the last men 
 left aboard touched fire to matches in twenty 
 places upon one or the other, and tumbled over the 
 side. The strands that held them were cut, and as 
 the first flames leapt from their decks they careered 
 before the wind against the Armada. It was about 
 two o'clock in the morning. 
 
 From the Ark-Royall, at the head of the English 
 line, was a sight not seen again in history. The 
 conflagration burnt up enormous, clear and high, 
 blazing first from the sterns of the fireships and 
 showing the square sails brilliant red against the 
 night. The gale blew the flames before it in broad 
 sheets, and one could hear the roaring of them 
 even against the wind. Down weather that float- 
 ing town of Spanish galleys shone out as the 
 dreadful light came near ; the tumbling and foaming 
 sea in a circle all around was conspicuous in the 
 strong glare, and the shape of every wave was 
 marked clearly for a cable's length around. 
 
 The Armada awoke. Among the thousands who
 
 188 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 crowded the decks, impeding the haste of the 
 sailors as they ran to let the anchors go, were many 
 who remembered that same awful sight upon the 
 Scheldt three years before, when the fireships had 
 driven against Parma's boom. There was no time 
 for the slow work of the capstans ; men took axes 
 and hacked at the cables forward ; the canvas was 
 run up as might be in such a medley, and the 
 monstrous bulks paid round in very varied manner, 
 confused and hampering one another as their head- 
 sails, with the sheets hard a-weather, caught the 
 gale. Not a few, on whom too much had been set 
 or too hastily, careened a moment dangerously to 
 leeward, then recovered ; there were shouts every- 
 where and a babel of orders; men running with 
 fenders to hang over the sides, as one big wall of 
 wood or another surged up too near in the dark- 
 ness ; at last all were turned and free, and the 
 herd of them went driving before the south-west 
 wind along that perilous shore. The men on the 
 Ark-Royall and the Lord Admiral, watching from 
 the height of the rail, cursed to see no fireship get 
 home. The set of the seas and the slant of the 
 wind drove one after another upon the flat stretches 
 of the beach, and there they burnt out, bumping 
 higher and higher as the tide rose along the flats, 
 and to their burning was added dull explosions as
 
 THE " ARK-ROYALL " 189 
 
 the fire reached their powder. But the Spanish 
 fleet was gone. 
 
 The Ark-Royall also weighed anchor and all her 
 sisters with her to take up that long chase again. 
 It seemed that the attempt had failed but with 
 the weather that was to be and the port of em- 
 barkation passed, the invasion could never come ; 
 this island had been certainly saved before the 
 stormy morning broke beyond the marshes of the 
 lowlands. 
 
 ***** 
 
 There was lightning all over heaven before it was 
 day, and the raging water was a little tamed by 
 cataracts of rain. The light grew dully through 
 the furious weather, the Spanish line was scattered 
 twenty miles thwart of the Flanders shore ; their 
 leading ships could see the opening of Ostend, their 
 laggards were still far west of Nieuport and near 
 their panic of the night. Off Gravelines the long- 
 range artillery of the English caught them. In 
 spite of the gale each fleet rallied to the sound of 
 the cannon, and all that Sunday long the guns 
 answered each other without a pause, but the 
 English had the range and the weather, and the 
 gigantic Spanish fabrics, leaning away from the 
 blast, shot short or high, while the English broad- 
 sides, leaning downward and toward the mark,
 
 190 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 poured in an accurate fire ; those smaller vessels 
 also turned well and quickly even in such a sea, 
 making of themselves a changing target, but 
 having fixed targets before them in the lumbering 
 masses of their opponents. The success of their 
 gunnery lent them hardihood, and the more 
 daring would sweep quite close to the Spanish sides 
 and sheer off again ; so was Drake's ship chiefly 
 struck. Had he chosen he might have avoided 
 any such offence and have done his work at full 
 range and in safety, but he was warm to it, and the 
 dancing manoeuvre pleased him. He was hulled 
 forty times, but he swam. 
 
 When the night fell this running business had 
 got off the mouth of the Scheldt. The wind backed 
 a little and blew stronger, but no longer toward the 
 land ; the great Armada ran northward before it 
 into the midst of a widening sea, and so up and 
 away, and an end to the great concern. 
 
 But the men of the Ark-Royall (which had 
 commanded all that success) did not know its 
 greatness, and the Lord Admiral, back in port 
 from putting the enemy past the Firth, was fear- 
 ful of their return, and wrote to Walsingham : 
 " Sir, Sure bind, sure find. A kingdom is a great 
 wager. Sir, you know security is dangerous." 
 
 He might have spared his ink ; the thing was 
 done.
 
 THE APPRENTICE 
 
 JANUARY 30 (OR, AS WE SHOULD SAY, FEBRUARY 10), 1649 
 
 Charles I. was executed on this day, upon a scaffold out- 
 side the second window on the north of Whitehall Banqueting 
 Hatt, at four in the afternoon
 
 THE APPRENTICE 
 
 JANUARY 30, 1649 
 
 "jl/TEN were well into the working week ; it was 
 -^-*- a Tuesday and apprentices were under the 
 hard eyes of their masters throughout the City of 
 London and in the rarer business places that 
 elbowed the great palaces along the Strand. The 
 sky was overcast and the air distastefully cold, nor 
 did anything in the landscape seem colder than the 
 dark band of the river under those colourless and 
 lifeless January clouds. 
 
 Whether it were an illusion or a reality, one 
 could have sworn that there was a sort of silence 
 over the houses and on the families of the people ; 
 one could have sworn that men spoke in lower 
 tones than was their custom, and that the streets 
 were emptier. The trial and the sentence of the 
 King had put all that great concourse of men into 
 the very presence of Death. 
 
 The day wore on ; the noise of the workmen 
 could be heard at the scaffold by Whitehall ; one 
 hour was guessed at and then another ; rumours 
 
 193 N
 
 194 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and flat assertions were busy everywhere, especially 
 among the young, and an appentice to a harness- 
 maker in the Water Lane near Essex House knew 
 not what to believe. But he was determined to 
 choose his moment and to slip away lest he should 
 miss so great a sight. The tyranny of the army kept 
 all the city in doubt all day long, and allowed no 
 news ; none the less, from before noon there had 
 begun a little gathering of people in Whitehall, 
 round the scaffold at which men were still giving 
 the last strokes of the hammer. Somewhat after 
 noon a horseshoe of cavalry assembled in their 
 long cloaks and curious tall civilian hats ; they 
 stood ranked, with swords drawn, all round the 
 platform. Their horses shifted uneasily in the 
 cold. 
 
 The harness-maker's apprentice found his oppor- 
 tunity ; his master was called to the door for an 
 order from Arundel House, and the lad left his 
 bench quickly, just as he was, without hat or coat, 
 in the bitter weather, and darting through the 
 side door ran down through the Water Gate and 
 down its steps to the river. The tide was at the 
 flood and his master's boat lay moored. He cast 
 her off and pulled rapidly up the line of gardens, 
 backing water when he came to the public stairs 
 just beyond Whitehall. Here he quickly tied the
 
 THE APPRENTICE 195 
 
 painter and ran up breathless to Whitehall Gate, 
 fearing he might have missed his great expectation. 
 He was in ample time. 
 
 It was perhaps half-past three o'clock when he 
 got through the gate and found himself in the press 
 of people. Far off to the left, among the soldiery 
 that lined the avenue from the Park to the Mall, 
 and so to St. James', a continuous roll of drums 
 burdened the still air. 
 
 The crowd was not very large, but it filled the 
 space from the gate to the scaffold and a little 
 beyond, save where it was pressed outward by the 
 ring of cavalry. It did not overflow into the wide 
 spaces of the park, though these lay open to White- 
 hall, nor did it run up towards Charing Cross beyond 
 the Banqueting Hall. 
 
 The apprentice was not so tall as the men about 
 him ; he strained and elbowed a little to see, and 
 he was sworn at. He could make out the low 
 scaffold, a large platform all draped in black, with 
 iron staples, and a railing round it ; it covered the 
 last three blank windows of Whitehall, running 
 from the central casement until it met the brick 
 house at the north end of the stonework ; there the 
 brickwork beneath one of the windows had been 
 taken out so as to give access through it from the 
 floor within to the scaffold on the same level
 
 196 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 without ; and whispers round told the apprentice, 
 though he did not know how much to trust them, 
 that it was through this hasty egress that the King 
 would appear. Upon the scaffold itself stood a 
 group of men, two of them masked, and one of the 
 masked ones, of great stature and strong, leant 
 upon the axe with his arm crossed upon the haft of 
 it. A little block, barely raised above the floor of 
 the platform, he could only see by leaping on tiptoe, 
 catching it by glimpses between the heads of his 
 neighbours or the shoulders of the cavalry guard ; 
 but he noticed in those glimpses how very low it 
 was, and saw, ominous upon it, two staples driven 
 as though to contain the struggler. Before it, so 
 that one kneeling would have his face toward the 
 Palace and away from the crowd, was a broad 
 footstool covered with red velvet, and making a 
 startling patch upon all that expanse of black 
 baize. 
 
 It was cold waiting ; the motionless twigs of the 
 small bare trees in the Park made it seem colder 
 still. The three-quarters struck in the new clock 
 behind him upon Whitehall Gate, but as yet no 
 one had appeared. 
 
 In a few moments, however, there was a move- 
 ment in the crowd, heads turning to the right, and 
 a corresponding backing of the mounted men to
 
 THE APPRENTICE 197 
 
 contain the first beginnings of a rush, for the 
 commanders of the army feared, while they 
 despised, the popular majority of London ; and the 
 wealthy merchants, the allies of the army, had 
 not joined this common lot. This turning of faces 
 towards the great blank stone wall of the Palace 
 was caused by a sound of many footsteps within. 
 The only window not masked with stone, the 
 middle window, was that upon which their gaze 
 universally turned. They saw, passing it very 
 rapidly, a group of men within ; they were walking 
 very sharply along the floor (which was here raised 
 above the level of the window itself and cut the 
 lower panes of it) ; they were hurrying towards the 
 northern end of the great Banqueting Hall. It 
 was but a moment's vision, and again they appeared 
 in the open air through the broken brickwork 
 at the far end of the stone fa9ade. 
 
 For a moment the apprentice saw clearly the 
 tall King, his face grown old, his pointed beard 
 left full, his long features not moved. The great 
 cloak that covered him, with the Great Star of 
 the Garter upon the left shoulder, he drew off 
 quickly and let fall into the hands of Herbert. He 
 wore no hat ; he stepped forward with precision 
 towards the group of executioners, and a little 
 murmur ran through the crowd.
 
 198 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 The old Bishop, moving his limbs with difficulty, 
 but suppliant and attendant; upon his friend, 
 stood by in an agony. He helped the King to pull 
 off his inner coat until he stood conspicuous in the 
 sky-blue vest beneath it, and round his neck a 
 ribbon and one ornament upon it, a George carved 
 hi onyx. This also he removed and gave to the 
 Bishop, while he took from his hands a little white 
 silken cap and fixed it firmly upon his long and 
 beautiful hair. From beneath the sky blue of his 
 garment, at the neck and at the wrists, appeared 
 frills of exquisite linen and the adornment of lace. 
 He stood for a few moments praying, then turned 
 and spoke as though he were addressing them all. 
 But the apprentice, though he held his breath and 
 strained to hear, as did all others about him, could 
 catch no separate word, but only the general sound 
 of the King's voice speaking. The movement of 
 the horses, the occasional striking of a hoof upon 
 the setts of the street, the distance, covered that 
 voice. Next, Charles was saying something to the 
 masked man, and a moment later he was kneeling 
 upon the footstool. The apprentice saw him turn 
 a moment and spread his arms out as an example 
 of what he next should do ; he bent him toward 
 the block it was too low ; he lay at full length, and 
 the crowd lifted and craned to see him in this posture.
 
 THE APPRENTICE 199 
 
 The four heavy strokes of the hour struck and 
 boomed in the silence. The hands of the lying 
 figure were stretched out again, this time as a final 
 signal, and right up in the ah* above them all the 
 axe swung, white against the grey sky, flashed and 
 fell. 
 
 In a moment the group upon the scaffold had 
 closed round, a cloth was thrown, the body was 
 raised, and among the hands stretched out to it 
 were the eager and enfeebled hands of the Bishop, 
 trembling and still grasping the George. 
 
 A long moan or wail, very strange and dreadful, 
 not very loud, rose from the people now that their 
 tension was slackened by the accomplishment of 
 the deed. And at once from the north and from 
 the south, with such ceremony as is used to the 
 conquered, the cavalry charged right through, 
 hacking and dispersing these Londoners and 
 driving them every way. 
 
 ***** 
 
 The apprentice dodged and ran, his head full of 
 the tragedy and bewildered, his body in active fear 
 of the horses that pursued flying packets of the 
 crowd down the alley-ways of the offices and Palace 
 buildings. 
 
 He went off by a circuitous way to find, not 
 his master's house after such an escapade,
 
 200 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 but his mother's, where she lived beyond St. 
 Martin's. 
 
 The dusk did not long tarry ; as it gathered and 
 turned to night small flakes of snow began to fall 
 and lie upon the frozen ground.
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 
 
 DECEMBER 10 (OR, AS WE SHOULD NOW SAY, 
 
 THE 20TH) 1688 
 
 The Kings of England had held by legitimate descent, or on the 
 plea of it, from the Conquest to the close of 1688, when the 
 landed and merchant classes, relying on the strong religious 
 support of London, and upon the ^lnpopularity of the King in 
 the West, called in a foreign army and transferred the Crown 
 from James II., the last legitimate King, to his daughter and 
 her husband. The prime act of James' fall was to send his wife 
 and child away, he following
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 
 
 DECEMBER 10, 1688 
 
 IT was advisable in the old days for those who 
 could travel by way of the Thames in 
 London, or would cross that river, to await high 
 tide, for everywhere down the long stretch of tidal 
 water, from far above Westminster to far below 
 the Tower, great stretches of mud forbade approach 
 during three-quarters of the tide, save at some 
 few places where a ditch or channel entered the 
 stream (as at the Fleet) or where (as in the City of 
 London) wharves had been constructed steep on to 
 the water. 
 
 It was two in the morning and the tide was at 
 full flood though not yet at its highest. The swirl 
 of the water was pouring up under the walls of the 
 Palace, past St. Stephen's, and on past the little 
 houses by the waterside in the fringes of West- 
 minster beyond, where the barges lay moored. 
 The darkness was extreme, a gale roared up from 
 the south-west against the tide and raised sharp 
 waves in the quarter of a mile of river. Of the 
 
 203
 
 204 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 shore beyond one could see nothing ; there were no 
 lights, and even had there been the furious and 
 ceaseless rain would have blotted out all perception 
 of them. 
 
 At the foot of the little damp stairs next to the 
 broad gravel slope of the ferry a small open boat 
 tossed and bumped against the brickwork, with 
 one man in it, guarding it. There was no watch- 
 man by nor any one abroad on such a night. It 
 was the night following the Sabbath, and Protestant 
 London was well asleep. It was impossible even 
 to hear the noise of wheels through the roaring of 
 the weather and the slapping of the water driven 
 before the south-west wind against the river wall, 
 when there appeared in the darkness at the head 
 of the steps a coach that had come at speed, and 
 soon descending from it and standing at the wall 
 five figures, three women and two men. They were 
 speaking hurriedly in a foreign tongue ; the one 
 dressed as a common seaman, the other, it would 
 seem, a gentleman ; and one of the women bore in 
 her arms with care a little bundle of linen. As for 
 the two others, they were Italians of the common 
 people, a washerwoman and her friend. Even as 
 they went down the few steps the shock of the 
 wind appalled the women. The men handed them 
 carefully down the little declivity. The boat was
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 205 
 
 held as fast as it could be on the tossing water, 
 but not without difficulty. The washerwoman, 
 who was the Queen, her Italian maid, the nurse, 
 the bundle which was a six-months child were 
 handed or carried into the boat and took their 
 seats there. They were dressed very plainly and 
 darkly ; the child remained asleep ; the secret was 
 not betrayed. The two men, who had exchanged 
 a word or two in French, stepped in after them, and 
 the boat was shoved off. 
 
 It was the very early morning of Monday, the 
 10th or, as we should now call it, the 20th of 
 December in the year 1688. 
 
 The oars did their best in the rough water and 
 against the furious wind : the tide helped them, 
 and the course, set almost directly against the 
 wind, got them slowly towards the further shore. 
 The passage was full of danger. They shipped 
 water and heeled, the chop of the tide and the 
 swirling eddies against the wind baffled them at 
 every moment ; the boat was too small for such a 
 load and for such weather, and when the oars 
 missed a wave or struck it the peril was grave. 
 
 At last the water grew smoother under the lee 
 of the buildings and of the water wall of Lambeth, 
 and with a little seeking the craft of the waterman 
 sufficed to find the public stairs upon the Surrey
 
 206 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 side. They caught the ring, the silent women 
 disembarked as best they could, though with 
 greater ease than they had gone aboard. The boat 
 was paid off, and the five stood together at the 
 head of the steps looking for the coach that should 
 have met them. It was not there. 
 
 All those tales of disaster which grow into such 
 huge legends and all that atmosphere of dread 
 which accompanies the abandonment of high 
 resolves weighed upon the mind of the Queen. 
 Her southern violence, grown to strength in the 
 maturity of thirty years, her new maternity, the 
 greatness of the despairing enterprise, the very fact 
 that she herself so long opposed it, lent her courage, 
 and she was concerned only for the boy of six 
 months old exposed to such a storm. 
 
 They took what refuge they might under the 
 shelter of the old church wall to their right, in 
 desperate anxiety lest the cry of the child should 
 betray them, or lest even on that wild December 
 night some belated passer-by or some early traveller 
 hailing the ferry or some watchman with his 
 lantern turning the corner of the Archbishop's 
 garden might not ask who they were and raise an 
 alarm. The sailor it was St. Victor thus clad a 
 noble from the Rhine, ran into the night. In a 
 little while he had returned to find Lauzun still
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 207 
 
 guarding the women, and with him he brought 
 from an inn near by the carriage which had delayed 
 there. Lauzun accompanied the Queen and her 
 maids within, the other, the sailor, sat upon the 
 box by the driver as a kind of guard against acci- 
 dent or surprise, and they drove off through 
 the tempest and the darkness eastward toward 
 Gravesend, down that old road which has seen 
 the marching of so many armies, the triumph 
 and the abandonment of so many royal things, 
 and which has been during all history our main 
 avenue of approach and of retreat. 
 
 The adventure was completed, and successfully ; 
 the child, who was never to reign, was safe, and 
 his mother also. With the daylight the ebb tide 
 took them, under the loyalty of an Irish guard, 
 down stream to the North Foreland ; once outside 
 the reef of Long-nose the gale struck them full, 
 they had to anchor for the tide : then all that day, 
 all the next night, they held desperate across the 
 Straits, labouring for French land in the teeth of 
 blinding weather. Mary of Modena, still defiant and 
 still strong, lay abandoned below, still neglected 
 in her disguise, and endured the passage. 
 
 Meanwhile in London James could not sleep. His 
 character, very fixed and narrow, had in it certain 
 passionate emotions. The safety of this woman,
 
 208 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 whose opposition, violence, and sudden decisions he 
 had endured for so many years, was a matter of more 
 concern to him even than the last desperate tangle 
 of the State wherein he was now hopelessly seized. 
 The use of opiates by which he had attempted to 
 secure some rest during those tragic days and 
 nights had worked evilly upon a temperament 
 already nervous and very hard worn by the treason 
 of all whom he had trusted or loved. He was 
 haggard with extreme fatigue and with the appall- 
 ing vision of misfortune which rose enormous upon 
 him from every side. 
 
 For hour after hour of that Monday in the 
 drenching weather he had fretted, unable to bend 
 his mind to anything, until at least so much good 
 news as the safety of the Queen might mean should 
 arrive. It was not until the day was well advanced 
 that the news of her embarkation came to him, 
 but when it came he could breathe again. Lauzun 
 had accompanied the Queen to sea. St. Victor, 
 the same that, dressed as a sailor, had watched the 
 coachman and seen to the driving of the carriage, 
 returned to London and gave his message to the 
 King. Of what fate the Queen and Prince of 
 Wales might have met in the Channel upon such a 
 night and in such weather he could tell nothing. 
 James was very certain that he could count them
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 209 
 
 less in peril upon the worst of seas than in the 
 hands of whatever fanatical mob might have 
 stopped them in the southern suburbs of the 
 city. 
 
 That evening the King could sleep, but before 
 he slept he sat down to write the letter which 
 admitted his design to be rid of the island, and 
 permitted such as still served him under arms 
 and could make at least " a pretence of loyalty " 
 such also, and there were many, as were " true 
 soldiers " and honourable in their service to 
 abandon his cause and to pit themselves no 
 longer against a nation that was ** poisoned " 
 and the foreign army which that nation had 
 " summoned." 
 
 The writs that had been drawn up in such haste 
 for the summoning of the new Parliament had not 
 all been issued ; some yet remained ; he himself 
 burnt them and watched them burn. Then, it 
 being perhaps 10 o'clock, he lay down ; it was not 
 for very long. At midnight he rose dressed as his 
 wife had done twenty-four hours before, in black, 
 quite plainly, and set out to follow step by step 
 the line the Queen had followed, down the same 
 hidden stairs, through the same paths of the 
 gardens of Whitehall upon the river, then to be 
 driven rapidly, Hales, whom he had protected 
 
 o
 
 210 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 for his faith, sitting by him, and so to the same 
 steps, by the same broad gravelled slope where 
 was the ferry to the Lambeth shore. As they took 
 boat in silence and over a stream less dangerous 
 than that which had imperilled the Queen, the 
 buildings upon the Westminster shore were not yet 
 wholly blotted out in the darkness, when above 
 the swing of the oars and their steady dip there 
 was a little splash from something which James 
 had thrown out into the night ; by the sound it was 
 of heavy metal, large for a man's hand ; it was the 
 Great Seal of England. 
 
 The two men landed ; horses were ready for 
 them. They rode and they rode through the 
 last hours before dawn ; they were well in the 
 gardens of Kent before the late winter daylight, 
 sodden with rain, rose over the flats of the shore. 
 It was high morning before they reached the place 
 of their embarkation. They took ship upon the 
 rough estuary and made down stream, only to be 
 stranded with the evening, held and at last 
 delivered back to the capital where James could 
 never again be, even for those few days, a true 
 King. While these things were doing, Mary of 
 Modena at last touched French soil at Calais and 
 was free 
 
 It was in this way that the unity of English
 
 THE END OF THE STUARTS 211 
 
 kingship, dependent upon one theory of right and 
 succession for six hundred years, was dissolved, 
 and that the last attempt to found a strong execu- 
 tive in England to curb the rich and to sustain all 
 against the few was washed away.
 
 SARATOGA 
 
 OCTOBER 6, 1777 
 
 General Burgoyne, in progress to cut the American Rebellion in 
 two by a march from the St. Lawrence to the sea, was successful 
 in all the first part of his campaign. Gross dilatoriness in 
 effecting the short portage from the Lakes to the Hudson gave the 
 enemy time to concentrate on that river. He was hemmed in on 
 the heights of Saratoga, found in a reconnaissance upon October 
 6 (here described) that he could not retreat, and on the 16th 
 surrendered. France was thus led to support the rebels, who 
 obtained their independence less than six years later
 
 SARATOGA 
 
 OCTOBER 6, 1777 
 
 THEY had gone for now some days under the 
 dripping woods in mournful weather ; the 
 straggling army finding no road, but rather clear- 
 ings in the forest, short of food, short of cartridge* 
 and of powder, with the wheels stuck deep in mud, 
 cattle rapidly commandeered and breaking down, 
 men tired out, falling out under cover of evening 
 and lost at roll-call. It was three days' march for 
 a healthy man alone; the mixed force had taken 
 three weeks. 
 
 They had suffered little harassment from any- 
 thing but Nature. The farmers in the open 
 country beyond the woods were sullen rather than 
 hostile, and had gathered against them only when 
 their own homesteads were in peril. At last, 
 after so dispiriting a journey, they saw before them* 
 broad and solemn under the changing colours of 
 those autumn woods, the stream of the Hudson. 
 They had, in the theory of the campaign, pierced 
 through. They had come from one watershed to 
 
 215
 
 216 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 another, they were upon the highway which cleft 
 the Rebellion, and the more imaginative of them 
 could contemplate far down that stream the 
 victorious garrison of New York, the English 
 harbour, and the sea that was wholly England's. 
 * * * * * 
 
 Three weeks later, upon the heights above 
 Saratoga, Burgoyne sat, somewhat peevish, a 
 politician (but not without humour), a gentleman, 
 contemplating the night. The gusts were already 
 cold, but the canvas flap stood open, and upon 
 his camp-table a lantern alone gave light, for the 
 wind would have extinguished candles. He had 
 determined definitely upon retreat. 
 
 Were history written by contemporary pens 
 (and, alas, it is very rarely so written) the bewilder- 
 ment of that moment would be apparent. 
 
 All military events are, by the nature of the 
 military trade, turned into a mathematical se- 
 quence, made into things of maps and plans which 
 the intellect can rejoice in, and which the young 
 officer can make his study or his toy ; but the 
 fight itself is usually a sort of chaos. So it was 
 here. Precisely how the entanglement had come 
 about neither Burgoyne himself nor any of his 
 staff could have told you. The advance of the 
 royal army towards the valley of the Mohawk had
 
 SARATOGA 217 
 
 been steady enough, the check before Stillwater 
 had been indefinite of its kind ; the hanging on, 
 and hesitation by, the banks of the river had been 
 without much plan, but also hardly tinged with 
 the fear of failure ; the gathering of the farmers 
 round about and of the rude militia of the rebels 
 had followed no exact co-ordination ; but one day 
 passed and another, news expected from down 
 the Hudson never came, supplies from the North 
 failed to arrive, there was an increasing friction 
 in the working of the machine, an increasing doubt 
 in the mind of the General until at last, as the 
 first week of October closed, that doubt had turned 
 to a fear. 
 
 It was October 6, a Monday. The woods were 
 very quiet all round, there was little sound save 
 the drip from the corners of the canvas and from 
 the leaves of neighbouring trees. The orders had 
 been issued, and at a certain hour of the darkness 
 the troops were gathered. They were not half 
 the garrison. They were somewhat more than a 
 quarter or perhaps a third of the men remaining 
 who could still bear arms, and it was their function 
 to take the road northward and to hold it against 
 the dawn, when all their comrades would break 
 quarters and with their train, though perhaps 
 forced to abandon in such weather and upon such
 
 218 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 sodden soil a portion of their pieces, begin definitely 
 the retreat toward Fort Edward, and so by the 
 Lakes to their base in Canada. 
 
 They were ordered in column, and they set forth. 
 
 Here and there at the heads of companies a 
 lantern swung, and frequently commands rang out 
 through the night, especially among the Germans, 
 to whom the idea of formation was a religion. 
 They formed and re-formed, dressing again and 
 again with the slow stiffness they still maintained. 
 
 Such lights and such commands were permitted 
 because the attempt had nothing of secrecy about 
 it ; that this disciplined and orderly European 
 force should be annoyed by the rude militia of the 
 backwoods seemed natural enough ; that it should 
 be intercepted by regular action as from a regular 
 enemy seemed quite impossible. And so in reason 
 it was impossible, nor did the armed farmers 
 themselves know in the least how much they were 
 attempting, nor was theirs a co-ordinate plan. 
 The column marched through the night, secure from 
 any intelligent envelopment, and weighted only by 
 that bitterness which hangs over soldiers when they 
 retrace the road. 
 
 Their leader, riding at the head of that long two 
 miles or more of men and wheels, rode in silence. 
 It was at a foot's-pace ; the hoofs of his horse
 
 SARATOGA 219 
 
 went warily, feeling the uncertain ruts and mud 
 of the woodland ride as it sank down toward the 
 valley. The rider, so riding, had in his mind what 
 he imagined to be a full conception of the mis- 
 fortune to which he was subject ; he had no vision 
 of the whole disaster. 
 
 He saw as in a picture the general plan of the 
 campaign postponed ; he saw the rebellion now 
 joining its two halves again from North to South ; 
 he saw the line of the Hudson abandoned and the 
 seaports held sporadically by garrisons dependent 
 perpetually upon the sea. He felt, as every soldier 
 feels when a plan is mucked up and spoiled, a sort 
 of tedious disappointment, largely personal, half 
 anger and half exasperation ; but in it all he saw 
 nothing of tragedy. The force would regain the 
 Lakes, they would rest upon that bright, dry, open 
 shore of Champlain ; the winter would confine 
 them to the valley of the St. Lawrence ; with the 
 next year, with the next spring, the added ex- 
 perience of this false start would make the advance 
 secure. A much larger and much better equipped 
 command would cut like a steel edge from Canada 
 to the Atlantic ; perhaps it would not even be 
 attacked. It would certainly be victorious. So 
 they went on, he thinking these things, through an 
 impenetrable night, to the sound of sogging foot-
 
 220 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 steps in the mud of the woodlands and to the 
 drip from the trees. A hundred yards ahead four 
 pioneers felt the way, and a corporal with them. 
 
 The four pioneers had with them a lantern, and 
 the light of it could be seen bobbing irregularly 
 over the roughness of the ground. The corporal 
 held it in his right hand ; it swung between him 
 and the private soldier who marched by his side. 
 
 There came one moment in the midst of this 
 marching and this silence, this darkness and this 
 reflection, when the whole avenue of the woodland 
 and the arch of it was lit by a sudden and explosive 
 blaze of light, and the sound of a musket crashed up 
 and re-echoed from the boughs. A whirl of leaves 
 fell from the splintered branch. Then came another 
 flash, another report, the sound of glass broken, 
 and the lantern fell to the ground. Then a third, 
 a loud German cry and one of the pioneers fell 
 forward shouting and complaining though it was 
 but a grazing flesh-wound. Just behind the 
 horses of the Staff the admirable discipline of the 
 English armies permitted an immediate deploy- 
 ment of the leading company, in spite of the 
 circumstances of darkness and of unexpected con- 
 fusion ; but even as they deployed all the brush- 
 wood before them was alive with a volley of guns, 
 perhaps eighty, perhaps a hundred yards away.
 
 SARATOGA 221 
 
 By the intermittent flashes from the muzzles of 
 their enemies the men could see a stockade of 
 trunks laid across the road with earth beaten 
 between, and from that stockade the fire con- 
 tinually poured. They answered with set volleys, 
 but they did not advance. 
 
 The head column so checked sent a shock all 
 down the line. Here a gun team had to be thrown 
 out to the right, there a mounted officer reined up 
 sharp, there again the pole of a waggon broke 
 under the sudden swerve. Certain of the middle 
 and rear companies bunched and huddled ; a 
 troop of the German Dragoons ran wild, their 
 horses turning and galloping away. There was 
 for a moment a danger possibly of anarchy, and 
 certainly of panic. The good order of the com- 
 mand conjured that danger ; there was an at- 
 tempt of a charge. Fire upon either flank 
 destroyed it. Then very soon the men formed 
 round again, their head now become their rear ; 
 they turned on that road, protected by the com- 
 panies that had first borne the fire, which volleyed 
 as they retired one behind the other in sections. All 
 was done with precision, with dignity, and with 
 knowledge. 
 
 The night was not long spent when they had 
 thus fallen back beyond the effect, and at last
 
 222 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 beyond the noise, of the musketry that had inter- 
 cepted them. When they reached camp again it 
 was not dawn, but in that interlude the whole plan 
 of the Colonial War had failed. For a week the 
 force kept quarters within its lines. Upon the 
 next Monday, the 13th, Burgoyne caused to be 
 drawn up for him an account of all that remained 
 to his contained command. There was but a 
 week's provision, and already horses had died for 
 lack of forage. He sent his note to the commander 
 of the American lines, and before ten that evening 
 he had got his answer, courteous and decisive 
 
 On the Tuesday and Wednesday the details of 
 the sad business were determined. On Thursday, 
 October 16, a date of repeated tragic and fatal 
 interest to Europe (it is the date of Wattignies 
 and of Marie Antoinette's death), the capitulation 
 was signed. Upon the morrow the garrison piled 
 arms and the history of the world was changed.
 
 DROUET'S RIDE 
 
 JUNE 21, 1791 
 
 Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, King and Queen of 
 France, attempting to fly from Paris in the midst of the Revolu- 
 tion, were intercepted just as they reached safety by one Drouet, 
 who galloped near midnight by a short cut to the town of 
 Varennes through the forest and roused the populace
 
 DROUET'S RIDE 
 
 JUNE 21, 1791 
 
 FT was already dark. That longest day of the 
 year had been cloudy, and though at sunset 
 a lurid shaft of red had shone from under the edges 
 of the cloud, the sky soon covered again and one 
 could see no stars. In the main room of the Town 
 House of Ste. Menehould a number of men were 
 talking all at once, as is the French habit, and 
 accomplishing things with an incredible rapidity. 
 Outside the public square was filling, and though 
 the mob as yet did not clamour, the noise from it 
 was rising ; in one place a man was struggling with 
 a soldier, calling him a German, and the soldier was 
 crying that it was false and that he was a French- 
 man from Burgundy. In the ugly steeple which 
 one could see squat against the night the bells rang 
 continuously and furiously, and twice a pistol shot 
 was heard in the darkness. All were now con- 
 vinced that the carriage which had left them not 
 an hour ago had contained the King. But with 
 every one volunteering at once to do this and to 
 
 225 P
 
 226 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 do that it was not until Drouet spoke with decision 
 that the pursuit was determined on. 
 
 Drouet was by nature a silent man ; tall, and 
 with a face like a hawk. He had long, clean legs, 
 suitable for riding on a horse ; he had the roll of 
 the cavalry, for he had served in that arm. He 
 went down to his stables and saddled the two 
 horses by lantern-light, and so went riding out 
 with his companion. The crowd gathered round 
 him ; as he came to the limit of the town he got 
 free of them, and immediately broke into a gallop 
 down the Clermont road. They listened to the 
 distant beat of the hoofs, expecting the trot or the 
 walk when he took the rise into Argonne, but they 
 did not hear it. Even in its utmost faintness, and 
 before the noise of the ride was lost in the distance, 
 it was still a gallopade and a rhythmical pounding 
 through the night. 
 
 Over the crest of the hill and down into the steep 
 and muddy ravine where the mountain village of 
 Islettes, dirty and clumped, squats by the brook- 
 side, they galloped on, waking for one moment the 
 villagers as they passed with the furious clatter of 
 iron from the heavy hoofs of the posting horses ; and 
 again, after they had passed, there was heard that 
 distant fading of the gallopade, for the long flat rise 
 before them did not check their course. But just
 
 DROUET'S RIDE 227 
 
 as they approached its summit in a place where the 
 great trees of Argonne line the road upon the 
 right, and upon the left are separated from it by 
 nothing but a narrow strip of mead (where to-day 
 the railway runs), there mixed with the noise of the 
 hoof -beats beneath them the noise of a distant hail. 
 They drew rein, and very soon tall riding figures 
 loomed up in the night upon the skyline of the hill- 
 top before them, and when they hailed again, 
 Drouet recognised his own grooms. The groups 
 mingled, and to the panting of the two strained 
 beasts, the occasional pawing of the tired post- 
 horses of the others, the story of the coach was 
 rapidly told. It was on two miles ahead, rolling 
 rapidly to Neuville, and so to Varennes. It was 
 bewildering news, for all Ste. Menehould had 
 thought that the King's flight was to Metz. And 
 in a moment the active mind that lay behind the 
 close-set eyes of Drouet seized the tactics of that 
 night upon which depended the fate of the Capetian 
 Monarchy, and of all Europe too. The coach had 
 doubled. Its start upon him was too great to be 
 caught up by following the road ; they would be 
 at Varennes and screened by a belt of soldiery 
 before he could ride them down. He must it 
 was his one opportunity plunge across the base 
 of that triangle and head the fugitives ; but this
 
 228 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 short cut lay not even over fields or common, it 
 lay through the immense forest of Argonne and 
 the high tangled ridge of the hill. He had, across 
 such country, not an hour before him, and more 
 than eleven miles to cover. He leapt the ditch, 
 he crossed the meadow, he took the thick of the 
 trees on his left, and urged his mount by a direct 
 threading of the undergrowth, until he came to 
 the summit whence proceeds the long line of the 
 hills. For that short mile only was the sound of 
 the hoof-beats hushed and time lost in necessity of 
 walking his horse. At the summit an alley opened 
 before him ; he struck spurs and galloped furiously 
 down again. 
 
 He was so native to Champagne that he knew 
 what none but the countryfolk know, and what 
 indeed no historian has discovered, that an old 
 track lay along the summit of the hill, open through 
 the dense growth of trees, dry from its situation on 
 the ridge, with here and there a fallen trunk or a 
 hummock of ground to imperil one, but still a 
 road of a kind. It is of immense antiquity ; the 
 Gauls have used it, and the Romans, but the forest 
 has grown up round its southern end ; it comes 
 up blindly against the undergrowth and leads 
 nowhere. It had had no purpose in the history of 
 the nation during all that thousand years in which
 
 DROUET'S RIDE 229 
 
 the great edifice of the French Monarchy had risen 
 to the benefit of mankind ; and now this deserted 
 and haunted lane in the wood was the instrument 
 by which that Monarchy was destroyed. 
 
 Down it and down it, mile after mile, the horses 
 thundered. The night wore on, and from the 
 distant steeples of the villages in the plain beneath 
 the half -hour struck ; a couple of miles away 
 down on the plain, and parallel to Drouet's riding, 
 ran the straight high road, and on it, still rolling 
 ahead, but gained on with every bound of the 
 cavalryman's horses, went the berline and the 
 destiny of the Bourbons. 
 
 The riders came to a place where years before 
 murder had been done, and where a great white 
 stone had been set by the peasantry, who dread 
 the powers of evil that haunt such spots. This 
 stone was Drouet's mark, for here there branches 
 from the ridgeway a narrow and foul path which 
 leads downwards on to the Varennes road, and 
 strikes that road just as it issues from the forest and 
 at the gate of the little town. By this way alone 
 can a man on horseback get from the high ridge- 
 way down to the plain, unless indeed he is to go all 
 the way round and strike the main road through 
 the pass which lies a mile or two ahead. This 
 turning alone could accomplish Drouet's purpose,
 
 230 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and even so the issue was very near. The hardest 
 pace might fail to head the berline, and he might 
 have ruined his mount and clattered into Varennes 
 too late. They galloped and they galloped on, till 
 the woods suddenly ceased upon either side. They 
 heard beneath them the setts of the high road, and 
 immediately saw before them such lights as still 
 shone from the higher windows of Valmy. The 
 clock was striking the hour. Drouet dismounted : 
 wisely, for in the tortuous streets of the little place 
 and with the business before him he was freer on 
 the foot than in the saddle. 
 
 The whole place was silent. One would have 
 said that no one watched. The sluggish river 
 slipping between the piles of the bridge was the only 
 sound. He ran breathlessly up the High Street. 
 Between him and the archway that crossed clean 
 over it up the hill there was not a human being nor 
 light, save at one door, from which light streamed, 
 and in which a group of men were talking politics 
 of course, for it was a tavern ; but of the coach, 
 of soldiers, even of the horses for the change, not a 
 sign. He thought for a moment that he had failed. 
 He dashed into the tavern and asked if a berline 
 had rolled by. The stolid people of these hills 
 looked at him rather stupidly, wondering what he 
 meant. But he was known, and they answered
 
 DROUET'S RIDE 231 
 
 him. Nothing had been heard, nothing had been 
 seen. Then Drouet for the first time in that night 
 of thundering hoofs and riding saw the conclusion 
 of his plan. He told them that in the coach was 
 the King. Such time as it took, not to convince 
 them, but to get the mere fact into their heads, 
 was wasted ; but soon they had understood or 
 believed ; they rose, they scattered, one man to 
 raise the militia, another to find the Mayor, a third 
 to arm himself. As for Drouet, he went out into 
 the air of the street, could see nothing at first for 
 the glare of the light, waited a moment till his eyes 
 should be accustomed to the darkness, tht.^ rapidly 
 breasted the hill, keeping close upon the houses. 
 And suddenly, before he quite knew it, there was 
 the berline right on him, a huge mass of leather 
 and of packages and of humanity within and with- 
 out, girding on its brakes and sliding down the 
 stone of the street. His work was done, and the 
 doom of the Monarchy was accomplished.
 
 THE GUNS AT VALMY 
 
 SEPTEMBER 21, 1792 
 
 The allied Prussian and Austrian armies advancing againa 
 
 a French force of little military value, easily turned its posi ion 
 
 and were within striking distance of Paris, there to put an end 
 
 to the Revolution ; when, in turning to destroy the French force 
 
 left behind them after this turning movement, they met with a 
 
 check due to the rapid artillery fire of the French from the 
 
 plateau of Valmy. This slight interference with the elaborate 
 
 Prussian plans threw such confusion into the allied armies 
 
 as soon necessitated a retreat which changed the history of the 
 
 world
 
 SEPTEMBER 21, 1792 
 
 BROKEN by long marching through intolerable 
 driving rain, a welter of seasoned and un- 
 seasoned men, twenty thousand strong, they went 
 through the empty and mournful spaces that make 
 up the plains beneath the hills of Argonne. It is a 
 dreary land of little sluggish rivers, bubbling up in 
 marshes and oozing to the Marne : little deserted 
 villages which no man knows, and through the 
 entrance of it one great royal road which for two 
 thousand years has been the road of invasion and 
 defence for Gaul. Here also Attila had been 
 crushed and Europe saved. 
 
 It was pitch dark, the rebels and the traitors 
 (who were many) had their grumbling washed out 
 of them by the long misfortune and fatigue, by the 
 dreadful rumours that the main army had been 
 completely defeated, by the days and days of 
 retreat, and by the bewildering counter-orders. 
 The young volunteers, broken with the weight of 
 their equipment, were cursing the folly of their 
 
 235
 
 236 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 enthusiasm and the war and the nation and the 
 rest of it. The baggage-train was encumbered 
 with a herd of useless men, of whom those who still 
 could walk held painfully to the carts for assist- 
 ance ; and over all this long serpent of men a 
 brutal discipline alone maintained the bond of 
 unity. 
 
 There was a further note of doom. Kellerman, 
 their General, had blundered and began to know 
 that he had blundered. He ought half an hour 
 before to have reached Gizancourt, upon its height 
 which dominates the lesser heights called " the 
 Moon," so that if Gizancourt was held, " the 
 Moon " (which was called so from the sign of its inn) 
 could not be held. But no lights showed through 
 the wet, no loom of houses stood out in the dark- 
 ness. In a moment he was still further bewildered 
 to find himself crossing the great road ; he made 
 up his mind to halt at the first moment. He did 
 so, when, not an hour later, the head of his column 
 had shambled into the village of Valmy, a dirty 
 hamlet with a great gaunt windmill, showing 
 darker against the darkness of the sky. There, 
 as the column halted, positions were taken, and 
 the drenched men slept upon a line of three miles 
 and more, and in that night some died. 
 
 With the next morning the rain had ceased, but
 
 THE GUNS AT VALMY 237 
 
 a dense mist covered everything. Men moved like 
 ghosts in the despairing dawn, and the notes of the 
 " Diane " to which the French awake were muffled 
 in the fog. When it was broad daylight Kellerman 
 attempted to repair his error. It was considerable. 
 There was no retreat from the position ; for re- 
 inforcements to reach him from Dumouriez upon 
 his right the only approach was a tiny narrow road 
 picking its way through the marsh, a road on which 
 cavalry would go single file, and on which it was 
 impossible to move a gun. Up in Argonne behind 
 him on the high road the Irishman, who with his 
 eight thousand was desperately holding the single 
 pass, was separated from him by a lake and 
 treacherous ground. With such force and after such 
 a blunder it is probable that Kellerman despaired, 
 but he was far too great a soldier to allow such a 
 mood to clothe itself with action : his first order was 
 to send out a force with light artillery and ample 
 cavalry that should take up the position he should 
 have reached the night before. Even as he gave 
 the order he heard that the enemy had passed 
 Hans ; that at any moment they might have their 
 guns emplaced upon the heights of " the Moon," 
 with no force at Gizancourt to annoy them. 
 There was a race for it in the thick fog, and at 
 about eight o'clock in the morning, as each was
 
 238 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 wondering how far his opponents might be, the 
 forces came in contact ; long before the French 
 had attained their object the Revolution had lost 
 that all-important handicap, and the force Keller- 
 man had thrown out retired. 
 
 The mist rose ; there succeeded to it a cold 
 drizzle, but a slight one, through which the land- 
 scape was quite plain ; and the French in their 
 long irregular line saw over the little valley the full 
 body of the Allies. From the Austrians far off on 
 the north it ran down in masses of men of changing 
 uniform and nationality to where at its southern 
 extremity Brunswick and the King of Prussia led 
 the veterans of Frederick. There was no move- 
 ment. The armies regarded each other, and then 
 suddenly their anger spoke in a furious cannonade, 
 and all the weight of metal was with the invaders. 
 
 It was a sustained and triumphant fire, which 
 terrified and broke the loose formations opposed 
 to it, and which, though it did not silence the 
 French batteries, unnerved that inchoate group 
 which huddled round the mill at Valmy. They 
 had not actually broken, but they were in con- 
 fusion, individuals seeking cover, the horses plung- 
 ing, many riderless, the guns half served, when a 
 sound much louder even than the thunder of the 
 field-pieces crashed among them, and where the
 
 THE GUNS AT VALMY 239 
 
 limbers stood wheel to wheel by the mill door the 
 flame of an explosion went up and completed the 
 disaster. Then Brunswick charged. 
 
 Kellerman called for a new horse (his own had 
 been shot in the last fury of the cannonade), and 
 as the Prussian columns formed for the advance he 
 took the last desperate remedy, odious to soldiers, 
 and consented to appeal to forces other than those 
 upon which sober generalship can calculate and 
 can decide. Here were his young men, all to 
 pieces from two hours' shelling ; there opposite tall 
 Grenadiers whose elders could remember the drawn 
 face and the Quixotic, passionate and glorious 
 leadership of the Hohenzollern, were upon them. 
 Here were the young men with nothing but the 
 memories in them (fast fading after so much rain) 
 of the delirium for " freedom," for a word ; the 
 young men who hitherto had felt no shock and 
 who had no wall but lost their souls in an artil- 
 lery hell; upon them, slowly in the long three 
 columns, were approaching those invincible men 
 who had for so long been a model to the soldiers 
 of Europe. In front of the young men Kellerman 
 rode, all along the line, looking into their faces. 
 There were a few faint cheers ; they grew some- 
 what louder, then smiling he took his plumed hat 
 off his handsome head and waved it, suddenly
 
 240 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 drew his sword, waved it before them too, and 
 called for cheers for the nation. The three 
 columns were at the base of the slope, the first 
 refusing with the old Prussian oblique tactic, the 
 second and the third advancing, one overlapping 
 the other. In a few moments the shock would 
 come. There was no sound of guns ; the Prussian 
 fire had ceased in order to permit the charge ; the 
 French fire was deliberately retained. But on 
 the crest to which the Prussian infantry was 
 advancing eighteen pieces stood converging in a 
 crescent, their teams untouched, their matches 
 lit, and the Major who commanded them watching 
 like a man who watches before unleashing a hound. 
 The cheers for the nation grew louder ; they 
 became general, and a movement of strengthen- 
 ing and formation ran along the line. It stiffened, 
 and the silence helped it to prepare. Then, long 
 after the heads of the Prussian columns had 
 entered within range of the lesser guns, when they 
 were all but in range of musket fire, the commander 
 of the crescent of batteries lifted his hand, and the 
 eighteen pieces crashed iron into the Grenadiers. 
 The columns wavered, but they kept formation, 
 and their ponderous advance continued. As it 
 continued all those guns, those eighteen guns, 
 firing not now together but at will, racing one
 
 THE GUNS AT VALMY 241 
 
 against the other as it were for rapidity and for a 
 gunnery prize, fired and fired, and almost as loud 
 as their firing came from the infantry line a fury 
 of cheers ; for the guns had worked in the hearts 
 of the volunteers, and perhaps of the rebels too, 
 that miracle of emotion which upon one occasion 
 and another has been the arm of God for the 
 salvation of French land. It was near noon and 
 the sense of doom was lifted, for the columns had 
 halted at last and they had not gained the hill. 
 They still kept formation with that magnificent 
 German tenacity which was and is their pride, but 
 they had turned face about, and only covering 
 sections faced the French line, and these also were 
 soon retired. 
 
 From that moment Europe was transformed. 
 
 It was a very small thing ; so small that to this 
 day no historian can fully explain its vast conse- 
 quence. The King of Prussia was in his great- 
 coat, watching the thing through glasses, and 
 blaming Brunswick for playing the fool with too 
 small a force, and for too much despising those 
 wastrels of the Jacobins. The French Princes, 
 who had no coats, were shivering in the wet, and 
 very freely complaining that the King of Prussia 
 might have lent them his. Brunswick, the sanest 
 and also the broadest of the governing minds upon 
 
 Q
 
 242 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 those heights of "the Moon," was pondering 
 whether it was possible to advance in force and 
 risk annihilation (for the Irishman still held the 
 pass with his eight thousand, and a reverse that 
 day, though slight, would mean starvation upon 
 the morrow with those tortuous communications 
 through the North) ; Clairfayt was urging that 
 the Austrians should be given their chance ; and 
 young Goethe, watching the whole affair, and 
 already knowing profoundly the minds of men, 
 decided in his heart that the turning-point in 
 history had come and passed. 
 
 At four the Austrians had their way. They 
 also failed. A fitful exchange of distant shots, 
 lobbed from now one cannon, now another, accom- 
 panied the decline of the light, and as the evening 
 darkened rarer and rarer flashes discovered the 
 emplacement of random guns. By seven all was 
 silent and it was night.
 
 MR. BARK'S ANNOYANCE 
 
 OCTOBER 16, 1793 
 
 Marie Antoinette, formerly Queen of France, was executed 
 just after midday on October 16, 1793. Negotiations for the 
 import of American grain into France (then suffering from war 
 and famine) were being conducted by the Revolutionary 
 Government. An American agent is here supposed suffering 
 an adventure on that day
 
 MR. BAKU'S ANNOYANCE 
 
 OCTOBER 16, 1793 
 
 MR. BARR of Philadelphia had risen at six 
 o'clock in his room of the Hotel of the 
 Golden Fleece, in the Rue Richelieu, upon October 
 16, 1793. He was ignorant of the French language, 
 but this ignorance did not disturb his even and 
 somewhat taciturn though genial mind. He had 
 come to Paris upon business which he knew would 
 be lucrative, and which he hoped he might conduct 
 without too great a strain upon that code of 
 morality which he held in common with Penn, the 
 founder of his commonwealth. His clothes were 
 neat, orderly, and rich, but not expansive in 
 colour ; they were of a puce, nearly black it was 
 so dark, and were of one hue in every part of his 
 garments. His shoes, which were buckled with 
 silver plate, his cane, which had a fine golden top 
 or knob, the heavy bunch of seals at his fob, and 
 the lace which showed at his stock proved him to 
 be a man of means ; but his wig, though it was 
 carefully tied, was undoubtedly provincial. His 
 
 246
 
 246 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 round and rubicund face was not ungenerous ; 
 but he was stout, and perhaps fifty years of age. 
 I should add that he was unmarried, although his 
 wife (if he had had one) would take no part in 
 his present adventure, yet it enables one to see 
 him more clearly when one knows that he was 
 a bachelor. 
 
 There were many things which Mr. Barr disliked 
 in the Gaul. He had landed but three days 
 before, but he already disliked the French villages, 
 he disliked the shrill French voices, and though 
 he had come into Paris too late in the evening to 
 see anything but a few dingy oil-lamps swinging 
 above wet and deserted streets, he was sure he 
 would be out of mood with the city ; but he bore his 
 disappointment with the tenacity of the Republican 
 he was, and fixed his mind as steadily as might be 
 upon the thought of his appointment which was 
 at noon with a clerk of the Government in the 
 Garde Meuble. He was as good as promised an 
 order for the shipment of grain, and every time he 
 thought of it his quiet and well-composed mind 
 became slightly but perceptibly gayer. 
 
 Mr. Barr threw open the windows. He detested 
 the French stuffiness, the French alcove beds, 
 and the heavy French curtains. He looked out 
 into what he would have called, with no great
 
 MR BARK'S ANNOYANCE 247 
 
 originality, " God's fresh air." It was already 
 light, and from this casement, which looked east- 
 ward, Mr. Barr could see a confused mass of roofs 
 over the empty expanse of the Palais Royal. 
 Upon these was falling a steady and disheartening 
 drizzle from an undeterminate dull sky. Mr. 
 Barr heard with curiosity the cries of the street 
 vendors below, he looked with not a little dread 
 down the great height which lay between his 
 window-bar and the ground. He determined 
 that he would spend the time between his break- 
 fast and noon in perambulating this famous city, 
 and hoped he should have time to discover one or 
 two of the spots he had seen mentioned in his 
 news-sheet at home as being connected with the 
 Reformation, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or 
 the successful voyage of the great Franklin. 
 
 When, therefore, Mr. Barr had eaten a very large 
 beefsteak (procured for him with difficulty and 
 cooked with a still greater difficulty at such an 
 hour), he went out into the narrow street and 
 turned southward a little vaguely to see what he 
 might see. 
 
 There was not much doing in Paris on that 
 morning; the drizzle seemed to keep many people 
 indoors, and even as he went through the laby- 
 rinth of little streets which occupied the courtyard
 
 248 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 of the Louvre he had but little sightseeing for his 
 pains. He did, indeed, stop a moment to look 
 curiously at a sentry in a tattered uniform with a 
 greasy red cap upon his head and a sheepish look 
 in his eye, but as he saw that the sentry resented 
 so close an inspection Mr. Barr very politely 
 continued his slow perambulation. 
 
 He crossed the river, spent quite half an hour 
 watching the workmen upon the new bridge beyond 
 the Tuileries Gardens, sauntered, more than ever 
 unoccupied, through the lanes of the University, 
 was annoyed to be jeered at by a group of little 
 boys, recrossed the river, visiting the spot where 
 Henry IV. had been stabbed, and then, finding by 
 his fat watch that it was over half-past ten, he 
 thought it high time to turn westward and get him 
 by the Rue St. Honore" toward the Garde Meuble, 
 for among Mr. Barr's dislikes was all hurry, con- 
 fusion and noise. It was therefore unfortunate 
 that as he came down a narrow street that 
 debouched near the disused Oratorian Church 
 (where he had intended to spend a few moments of 
 pious reflection before the House of Coligny) he 
 heard arising from the Rue St. Honor before him 
 an offensive clamour, more unpleasant in his 
 estimation than any of the other unpleasant 
 things he had come across among these very dis-
 
 MR. BARK'S ANNOYANCE 249 
 
 appointing people to whom, however, he was 
 forced to admit he owed much of his glorious in- 
 dependence from the British Crown. Much at the 
 same moment that this noise offended him he heard 
 in his rear a sharp rush of feet, and was swept down 
 towards the Rue St. Honore" by a new contingent 
 of the mob which was pouring from everywhere 
 into that thoroughfare like rivulets feeding a 
 torrent in spate. 
 
 Mr. Barr was too stout and too courageous a 
 man to be swept off his feet. He resisted a little 
 angrily ; his resistance caused one of the mob to 
 let drive at him with his fist, but the blow falling 
 short no further harm was done him, and, in- 
 deed, the pre-occupation of the crowd was too 
 great to allow for a quarrel. As they ran and 
 dragged him along with them they often went 
 tip -toe, craning their necks and giving excited 
 cries which Mr. Barr completely failed to under- 
 stand. 
 
 So surrounded and so driven, Mr. Barr found 
 himself at last wedged tight into a mass of men 
 and women who packed the Rue St. Honore* so 
 that one could move forward but at a crawling 
 pace, and from the mass so wedged and so slowly 
 proceeding went forth a cleaseless roar, the like 
 of which Mr. Barr had never heard save once in a
 
 250 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 September gale upon his recent voyage across the 
 Atlantic Ocean. 
 
 At the head of the great mob, and so close to Mr. 
 Barr that he could almost have touched them, 
 went a squad of soldiery as ungainly and tattered 
 as the sentinel whom he had watched that morn- 
 ing ; nay, they had not even a common uniform 
 nor an attempted one ; not one was shaven, 
 not one completely buttoned, and Mr. Barr noted 
 with acute irritation that the shoes of some were 
 actually missing ! Such confused thoughts as 
 ran in his mind in the midst of all this babel were a 
 general surmise that this nation (which he knew 
 to be at war) would at once and inevitably suffer 
 an overwhelming defeat. Meanwhile the squad 
 of soldiers in front of him and the long line that 
 loosely held each side of the street continued to 
 impress him less and less favourably and to add 
 to the already considerable discomfort this mis- 
 adventure caused him. He twice managed to 
 elbow a few inches' space and so to consult his 
 watch, though furtively, for he feared it might be 
 stolen. He was very seriously offended to find 
 that it lacked but half an hour of his appointment ; 
 but needs must, and he shuffled along foot by foot 
 with the procession which he involuntarily headed, 
 now and then shrinking back as best he could
 
 MR. BARK'S ANNOYANCE 251 
 
 when one of the ragged brutes in front of him 
 menaced him with the butt of his musket and 
 cursed him for pressing forward. 
 
 It was not until he had been in this situation for 
 some ten minutes that Mr. Barr, who was a short 
 man, appreciated the cause of the commotion. 
 Beyond the squad of soldiery, and showing above 
 their heads, he saw the upper part of a priest's 
 figure, and close to it the upper half of the figure of a 
 seated woman, while showing still higher and 
 standing listlessly beside her was a tall, stout, 
 crop-headed fellow, hatless, and holding loosely in 
 his hand a rope, the other end of which was tied to 
 the woman's pinioned wrists behind her back. He 
 saw by their motion and their eminence that they 
 must all three be in some sort of cart. 
 
 In this group, the source and meaning of the 
 whole business, Mr. Barr took but little interest, 
 though he at once perceived that he had got into a 
 criminal business of some kind, and that here was 
 a prisoner being led to prison or perhaps to punish- 
 ment. He had no intention of remaining in 
 Paris, and his returning energies as noon approached 
 were concentrated upon escaping if possible from 
 the crowd by a side street, and that without 
 injury to himself or delay for his appointment. 
 But though he felt so little interest he could but
 
 252 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 watch the woman's face whenever a movement in 
 the soldiers in front of him gave him an opportunity. 
 
 That face was ashen, emaciated, and distraught ; 
 the eye in the profile towards him was dull and 
 blind, like the eye of some old spent creature ; a 
 few grey hairs escaped from beneath her cap ; 
 they were damp, short and rare, contrasting 
 meanly with the white and newly starched head- 
 dress ; she bent forward from her neck and 
 shoulders, and it would indeed have been hard to 
 say whether she was animate or inanimate. She 
 seemed not to hear the voice of the crowd, and the 
 priest sitting opposite to her had ceased even his 
 perfunctory gestures, so irresponsive was her face 
 and form. All around this dumb show and 
 hideous, from the crowd, from windows of the tall 
 houses, from the very air, as it seemed, shouts 
 and curses perpetually rang when suddenly Mr. 
 Barr of Philadelphia saw his opportunity. 
 
 They had just passed the house of Robespierre, 
 and the pressure at the head of the column was 
 relieved by a movement in the mob which halted 
 to cheer the Tribune ; a free space of a yard or 
 two was at once formed between the column of the 
 populace and the still advancing tumbril with its 
 ragged guard. Through that space with somewhat 
 undignified speed Mr. Barr darted to the left, and
 
 MR. BARK'S ANNOYANCE 253 
 
 dodging through a line of soldiers found himself 
 in the little lane which flanks the Garde Meuble. 
 
 Now he was inside the great doors, a little 
 flushed, but walking with recovered dignity up 
 the stone stairs of that palatial office ; now he 
 was ushered with becoming ceremony into the 
 secretary's room. 
 
 Even here he suffered a last annoyance ; these 
 unbusinesslike and gimcrack people were gathered, 
 clerks and secretary and all, at the tall windows 
 that overlooked the Place de la Revolution, and 
 it was with difficulty he could attract their atten- 
 tion. Even when he had done so, they would not 
 leave the panes. 
 
 They had some excuse ; they also were watching 
 that tumbril, but they knew, what he did not, 
 that the fainting woman seated there was the 
 Queen.
 
 GOENAY 
 
 JUNE 1794 
 
 Among tJie prisoners executed at the end of the Terror was a 
 young cavalryman, Gornay, whose name was not upon the list 
 of the condemned, though upon that of the imprisoned. It is 
 not known how the error was committed nor why its victim did 
 not protest
 
 GORNAY 
 
 JUNE 1794 
 
 TT was June and very hot ; it was the hotter 
 -*- because the inner courtyard of the Concier- 
 gerie got no air from above or below. It was like a 
 well of old, unpleasant stone marked all the way 
 up by narrow windows, the lower storeys of which 
 were barred and the last of which only just showed 
 above the flag-stones of the pavement. There was 
 a drowsiness in the air, which came from the early 
 summer heat, but under the eaves high above 
 could still be heard in this early month the twitter- 
 ing of birds. There still lingered also something 
 fresh in the happy blue of the sky, the little patch 
 of sky which a man could catch by standing near 
 the broad window of the cell and gazing upwards. 
 
 Within that cell were perhaps a dozen assembled. 
 
 The prisons of the Revolution were but passages 
 from a Life to a Life. They had about them none 
 of the appurtenances which go with the verdict 
 of regular and therefore hypocritical tribunals. 
 The names of those batches of the doomed were 
 
 257 E
 
 258 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 spelt hurriedly and ill, or sometimes not at all. 
 The victims themselves entered, and remained, in 
 their civilian dress ; they spent their time in 
 human companionship ; they ate such food as 
 their purses could provide them, nor were they 
 subjected to inhuman regulations or to inhuman 
 apathy. 
 
 The prisoners in this cell were very various in 
 kind. A long, low and solid deal table ran down 
 the length of the room ; its trestles grated, as men 
 leant against it, along the stone floor. Beside it 
 ran a bench as rough and as strong. The dark, 
 high walls were damp with the moisture of prisons. 
 A crucifix had been hung upon a nail at one end, 
 and near the window a woman had stretched a 
 rosary upon two nails. The emblems seemed 
 to some meaningless, to one or two ridiculous, to 
 the rest a mitigation of the memory of death. 
 
 And yet, as in any other room full of prisoners in 
 that June morning, but few were sure of dying. 
 Of all the multitude of those whom the Terror 
 held, upon suspicion or to save the Republic from 
 spying, or to prevent the forging of money by the 
 enemy, or for any other reason, those that at last 
 were led out of the door into the sunlight and to 
 death were a minority. But there was this about 
 that fantastic time : that the forms of law were so
 
 GORNAY 259 
 
 hurried, the sequence of political accident so 
 tumultuous, that no man felt any kind of security, 
 even in his written sentence ; some, clearly con- 
 demned and having had their sentence read to 
 them and having gone through the sweat of the 
 agony, fantastically survived ; others, thinking no 
 doubt that the key had turned upon them only for 
 a few hours, untried, uncondemned by some mis- 
 spelling or some accident of the pen, might hear 
 their names called out upon the daily list. These 
 last were not very many ; in all those four months 
 during which martial law ground and made even 
 the face of the Republic, in all the prisons not 
 much more than a thousand perished. But the 
 tantalisation and, as it were, the gamble of death 
 was over the whole city within the prisons and 
 without. For if a man sent money to his son 
 hiding in some German town he, the father, died. 
 And if a peasant held back corn from the armies 
 for a rise in price, he also died. 
 
 This room full of prisoners, I say, was very 
 mixed. Three boasted that they were noble but 
 there were half a million nobles in France, and 
 these three were very threadbare nobles. One was 
 a Breton who had helped an orthodox priest to 
 escape ; he sat there foolishly smiling, unable to 
 speak their tongue. He was dressed in broad
 
 260 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 knickerbockers and had fine metal buttons upon his 
 coat, and in his hat there were gay ribbons. Another 
 was an apothecary, for long the chief Jacobin of a 
 country town, but one who had most undoubtedly 
 bought corn with coin to sell it for assignats to the 
 regiments as they marched through, and then again 
 to turn the paper into metal ; a court-martial had 
 condemned him to be sent to Paris, and there the 
 tribunal had dealt with him ; he was to die. He 
 was a little wizened man, over sixty years of age, 
 one who had never known religion and who had 
 lost all dignity of life, and the thought of death 
 was intolerable to him. He sat in the corner most 
 remote from the light, upon a rickety chair, biting 
 his nails and looking over his hand, like an animal 
 with bright eyes. 
 
 The rest of the group were gathered together, 
 talking without vivacity of this thing and of that, 
 and even of what fate might be before the one or 
 the other. 
 
 To these, then, on the stroke of noon and while 
 the hour was still sounding from the great clock 
 upon the corner tower, entered a young man quite 
 distinct from any other who had come into that 
 prison before. His face was clean and ruddy, his 
 stature considerable, his limbs were large, strong, 
 straight and well held, his gait easy and his
 
 GORNAY 261 
 
 manner altogether not only that of a soldier but 
 of a soldier who for many months had lived in 
 the open air. 
 
 He was from the eastern frontier, and, as it 
 seemed, from Lorraine ; his hair was of a warm 
 yellow, and the something German in his face was 
 relieved by the vivacity and irony of his eyes. 
 His uniform, which was still left upon him, 
 brightened all his way, but as he walked he missed 
 some balancing thing, which was his sword. For 
 as he passed the gates of the prison his sword had 
 been taken from him. 
 
 He bowed to them and said : 
 
 *' My name is Gornay." 
 
 No one answered him except the one woman in 
 the place, and she, though she bowed in return, was 
 too jaded with sorrow to speak to any new-comer. 
 He continued : " My name is Gornay. It is 
 well that you should know it, for I was a Hussar 
 and may be a Hussar again." Then, as they still 
 kept silent, shrinking from this grotesque advent 
 of sunlight and of air, he added : 
 
 " Gentleman, for a pack of prisoners you seem to 
 me uncommon doleful ; and but for this lady I 
 should say I had no hosts at all in this particular 
 hotel." 
 
 At that time smoking was unusual save among
 
 262 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 the poor, but this new-comer, who was not a gentle- 
 man but a private soldier, badly felt the need of it. 
 He pulled some coarse tobacco out of his tight 
 trouser-pocket and rolled it in a dirty scrap of 
 paper which he found upon the bench beside him. 
 He pulled out a tinder-box, and then with elaborate 
 courtesy he asked, as he might have asked in the 
 barrack-room, whether he had leave to smoke. 
 
 His hostess bowed. She had never smelt tobacco 
 smoke close by in her life, and she wished to know 
 the smell of it. As for the apothecary, for all that 
 his mind was intent upon approaching death, he 
 growled and refused. 
 
 Gornay very politely hesitated to light his little 
 twist. 
 
 " Go on, my lad ; go on," said the woman in a 
 very sweet and patronising voice. (Outside she 
 had been a milliner and knew the manners of 
 the great.) 
 
 " But if this gentleman objects ? " said Gornay, 
 and the apothecary muttered evilly that he did 
 not object. 
 
 Then Gornay lit his cigarette, and, blowing out a 
 very miserable little line of smoke, he pretended 
 to an immense satisfaction. 
 
 " Gentlemen," said he, " I wonder if life has 
 anything better than this d ? "
 
 GORNAY 263 
 
 In their reading, before their trials the Parisian 
 prisoners at least had been used to such affected 
 paradox, and they did not even deign to answer 
 now that they were in the very presence of reality. 
 But the apothecary said to him with a scowl : 
 
 " For what are you condemned ? 
 
 Gornay answered in the frankest tone in the 
 world and with the brightest smile : " Upon my 
 soul, I cannot tell. And for what were you ? " 
 
 " Upon my soul I will not," the apothecary 
 muttered. 
 
 " At any rate," said Gornay, as lightly as though 
 he were keeping up the conversation in a play, 
 " one has this advantage in revolutions, that 
 one knows it was nothing very disgraceful ; you 
 were not a usurer, I suppose ? you committed no 
 murder, I take it ? and I very much doubt your 
 burning down a house, even though it were your 
 own." As he said this he blew out the smoke 
 again with something of a suspicion of insolence, 
 and then suddenly tapped his older companion 
 upon the shoulder and said : 
 
 " Be comforted. In a revolution every man's 
 honour is safe, and there are splendid opportunities 
 of dying." 
 
 The narrow corridor outside echoed to another 
 step than that of the monotonous turnkey, who
 
 264 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 paced up and down it for his living under the light 
 of a small and evil-smelling lamp. 
 
 The new step was at once heavy and rapid ; it 
 was a step of which they all had read or heard. Some 
 braced themselves to meet it by an iron indifference. 
 The woman felt so ill that she could hardly stand, 
 but such was the dignity of her sex that, clenching 
 her hand and leaning upon the table with it, and 
 turning her face from the light, she was not 
 humiliated by any physical failure. Only the 
 poor apothecary man, the money-dealer, went to 
 pieces at that sound. He bit, no longer his nails, 
 but the ends of his fingers, and he made a little 
 whining noise with his throat. Gornay the while 
 was beginning a story of what death felt like when 
 it was near one in action, a moment which, soldier- 
 like, he affected to know, but which, in truth, he 
 did not know at all. 
 
 The key was in the door and in the poor old 
 apothecary's eyes there stood two large cold 
 tears. Such colour as had been there completely 
 left his forehead, his temples, and his cheeks, and 
 gathered under his eyes, and his mouth was most 
 unpleasantly drawn. But Gornay was still Gornay. 
 He bent down almost kindly like a son and said : 
 
 " What is your name ? " 
 
 The old man said : " It is no use."
 
 GORNAY 265 
 
 Gornay answered : " It is evident that you have 
 never answered a roll-call." Then he said again : 
 ; ' What is your name ? " 
 
 ' Braz," said the old man, but he whispered it 
 from so dry a throat that one could hardly hear it. 
 
 Gornay, as though he had met a traveller upon a 
 road, said genially : 
 
 " A Gascon, by God ! ' 
 
 The door opened, and the officer with the written 
 list in his hand began to read : 
 
 *' Perac, demoiselle.' 1 '' 
 
 " Manzon fils." 
 
 The woman could just move, and she moved 
 forward. A man came after. 
 
 " Kernouel.' 
 
 The foolish Breton smiled and moved hearing his 
 name. They hustled him into line. 
 
 The reader murmured down a list of names, 
 ticking off those awaiting him in other rooms, and 
 calling aloud the remaining names in this, till he 
 came to the last, and sang out : 
 
 " Braz.' 
 
 Then Gornay, from the table on which he had 
 been half-seated, rose, put his hand upon the 
 shoulder of the old apothecary to prevent his 
 moving, and came into line with the rest. Just as 
 they led the four through the door, and while the
 
 266 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 apothecary was looking on, hardly understanding 
 what had happened, the turnkey said harshly to 
 that soldier : 
 
 " There is no smoking here ! " 
 
 And Gornay, with more regret than he had yet 
 shown, threw the cigarette down and trod upon it 
 carefully, and having done so marched on much 
 more mournfully, with the desire of tobacco strong 
 upon him. 
 
 This is the way that Gornay died, and why he 
 was so anxious for death, or rather so avid of it, 
 has never been determined.
 
 THERMIDOR 
 
 JULY 1794 
 
 A Committee, of the Revolutionary Parliament was chosen in 
 the worst crisis of the war with Europe to be dictator and ad- 
 minister martial law. Robespierre, the idol of the moment, was 
 nominally a member, but his love of popularity interfered with 
 the desire of each of the others to make his own department ( War, 
 Finance, &c. ) workmanlike. He came more and more rarely, 
 at last only to ask for favours for protfyts, and finally the Com- 
 mittee determined to be rid of him and he fell from power
 
 THERMIDOR 
 
 JULY 1794 
 
 rilHE year had turned, and though the heat 
 increased, the shortening of the day was 
 already apparent ; the morning broke more 
 tardily ; its slow approach was noted in the great 
 room upon the ground floor of the Pavilion de 
 Flore. 
 
 The Committee had been sitting through the 
 night : little chinks of daylight had just begun to 
 show where the tall curtain met and in the joints 
 of the huge gilded shutters, and the new light 
 contrasted with the yellow candles in their silver, 
 standing upon and reflected in the polished wood 
 of the great table. 
 
 There were other candles than these. Two 
 were set upon the floor where a great spread of 
 maps was pinned down to the waxed chestnut 
 wood, and there sprawling at full length was the 
 ungainly form of Carnot, fixing little flags at one 
 place and another. He grasped in one view, as he 
 lay there planning, what not Jourdon nor any 
 
 269 

 
 270 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 other upon the frontier could seize, the whole line 
 of the defence, or rather (for it had now come to 
 this) of the victorious advance which was not 
 to be checked until the Grand Army should have 
 shredded into retreat from Moscow. 
 
 Carnot lay there sprawled at full length, moving 
 now one of his candles, now the other, to read a 
 name or fix some detail of the Ardennes. His 
 odd, somewhat mishappen head, with its high 
 bulging forehead and scanty black hair falling 
 down in a wisp towards his eyes, looked the more 
 grotesque from the shadows these candles cast. 
 Every now and then he murmured to himself as 
 he wrote a note upon the margin of the map 
 or followed some natural feature with his 
 finger 
 
 There was no other sound save the scratching 
 of pens. Round the great table, jaded with so 
 many hours of continuous labour, still sat the 
 Committee. The freshest and the most carefully 
 dressed was the cleanly Barrere. He was writing. 
 Couthon, pinched and ill, was writing also ; so 
 were three others to his left. Only one was not 
 writing ; the boy St. Just, with eyes like Shelley's, 
 but more firm, sat back a little in his chair and 
 looked at no one of his companions but into dark- 
 ness. His eyes were filled either with memories
 
 THERMIDOR 271 
 
 that troubled him or with the fear of some approach- 
 ing doom. 
 
 The day continually broadened. It was still cool 
 in the July morning and the window, facing west- 
 ward, got no gleam of sunlight ; but the cessation 
 of the songs of birds in the gardens showed that the 
 sun had risen, and in a little while Barrere, dropping 
 his pen, stood up, stretched his arms, made some 
 exclamation of boredom, walked to the curtains 
 and pulled them aside, going round as he did so to 
 avoid treading on these great maps of Carnot's, 
 upon whose intent, ungainly figure he looked 
 down as he passed, half in amusement and half in 
 admiration. When the curtains were drawn and 
 the shutters thrown open, light so flooded into the 
 room that the candles lost their office. They were 
 blown out. Carnot rose and came to the table. It 
 was full day. In the sudden change from one 
 condition to another, as by a shock, all work 
 ceased and they looked at one another wondering 
 to see what an extreme fatigue was upon every 
 face. 
 
 Barrere had before him a little agenda scribbled 
 upon half a sheet of paper and he first spoke. He 
 said : '.* We cannot continue much longer. I 
 must sleep before the debates begin, and none of 
 you will be fit to defend the policy unless you also
 
 272 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 rest. We do not know who may be called on." 
 There was a gloomy and a silent assent from all 
 except from Couthon and from St. Just. The little 
 refined cripple and the boy knew well enough what 
 that policy was, but it was at the peril of their 
 lives to oppose it or to seem to oppose it : it was 
 the policy that would kill Robespierre, their friend. 
 Each waited, the cripple in fear, the boy in anxiety, 
 for the first question that might be addressed to 
 them. Each wondered how he should reply to it, 
 whether to pretend connivance with the ruin of 
 their leader or to profess ignorance of a design 
 against him. They dared not argue against the 
 scheme that was afoot, still less would they dare 
 to vote against it if it should come to a vote. 
 Luckily for them the silence was broken not by 
 any question addressed to either of them, but 
 by the harsh Cevenol voice of Jean Bon. Alone of 
 the eager men who made up that little assembly, 
 he showed in his face something that betrayed a 
 profound evil in the mind. It was an expression 
 full at once of secrecy and of hatred. 
 
 It had been determined in the Committee that 
 Robespierre should fall. His popularity was an 
 obstruction to their functions. His rule of opinion 
 clashed with their physical and actual powers ; 
 his phantasm of government with their true
 
 THERMIDOR 273 
 
 executive. Couthon and St. Just alone were his 
 friends upon that Board. Barrere officially, Carnot 
 with the natural impatience of a soldier and of 
 a creative mind, one for one reason and one for 
 another, but all for reasons of statesmanship, had 
 determined that the man must go. Not so Jean 
 Bon. With him there was the personal malice 
 of the less against the greater. It was the oppor- 
 tunity of a personal revenge that put light into his 
 small, dark and cunning eyes and tightened his 
 thin lips. 
 
 Jean Bon had just begun to speak when, with- 
 out warning, not announced for no stranger was 
 permitted there the door opened and Robespierre 
 himself walked in. 
 
 He had not slept any more than had the others. 
 He had spent the night in writing a defence which 
 he knew would be needed, but upon his high -boned, 
 set face the traces of fatigue were less evident than 
 in those of his colleagues ; and the extreme care of 
 his dress, the glistening silver upon his shoes, the 
 refinement of his hands lent a sort of freshness and 
 vigour to his person, coming in as he did, after that 
 long night sitting, upon men who had been in each 
 other's company for more than twelve hours. In 
 spite of that vigour every man present felt the 
 chasm between himself and them. At the best 
 
 s
 
 274 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 they saw him but rarely. They had but a moment 
 before been his judges. They were prepared to 
 condemn again when he should be gone. 
 
 He took the only empty chair of the ten, laid 
 his little cane upon the table, and next against it a 
 brown note-book that he had been carrying in his 
 hands ; then avoiding the eyes of all of them, 
 except for one rapid but fixed look at the troubled 
 expression of St, Just, he said that he had come 
 upon immediate business, that he would not 
 interrupt their labours, that his morning until 
 the debates opened was already full of engagements. 
 His business Was, he said, to remove the names 
 of two men from a list of the condemned they had 
 drawn up. 
 
 They did not ask him where he had learned what 
 was upon the list. They knew well enough that 
 though he had not been among them for days St. 
 Just was his regular informer. The great sheet of 
 foolscap lay in front of Barrere. It had lain there 
 for more than a day. Certain names had been 
 deleted ; one or two added. The signatures of a 
 quorum alone remained to be affixed before this 
 batch of twenty or so should be sent to their trial 
 in the Palais. 
 
 Barrere negligently, as though it were a daily 
 matter like any other, pushed the sheet of fools-
 
 THERMIDOR 275 
 
 cap to where Robespierre sat with his carefully 
 powdered hair, his dapper blue coat and exquisite 
 linen. As he so pushed, Barrere glanced furtively 
 but quickly at Carnot, and Carnot returned his 
 glance. 
 
 Robespierre drew the paper deliberately towards 
 him, put on his spectacles, steadied it with the little 
 delicate fingers of either hand as though to smooth 
 it out or hold it down, and let his sad grey eyes 
 wander down the list. Then, thoughtfully enough, 
 he took from the fob of his silk waistcoat a little 
 pencil cased in gold ; he drew the pencil slowly 
 through two names. When he had done this he 
 pushed the document back again to Barrere. 
 
 " Let me see the list," said Carnot in the same 
 tone, with the same carelessness as you would use 
 upon some small detail of an order. As he saw 
 the list he shook his powerful eccentric head 
 slowly from side to side. " It can't be done," he 
 said. "It is necessary for the defence of the 
 frontier. I was myself at pains to see that they 
 should be sent back from the front." Barrere, 
 when he had hesitated a little, added, looking at 
 Robespierre somewhat awkwardly : " I think 
 Carnot must have his way. It is his own de- 
 partment." 
 
 St. Just began to speak and then was silent. He
 
 276 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 tapped the table with his fingers. If he had dared 
 he would have told Robespierre to give way with 
 as good a grace as possible. 
 
 Meanwhile the face of Robespierre was, to what- 
 ever unseen intelligences were looking on that fatal 
 gathering, the very centre of energy in the group. 
 It was perfectly white, save where upon his high 
 cheek-bones a violent and feverish colour empha- 
 sised the general pallor of the rest. The veins of his 
 temples showed as they always did when he was 
 mastering himself for an effort of speech or of 
 control. He said in a voice somewhat lower than 
 was his wont, and speaking more slowly, still 
 looking at no one directly, gazing between Carnot 
 and Jean Bon at a carving upon the wall beyond : 
 " You are determined to sacrifice these two men ? " 
 All the hypocrisy native to Jean Bon was called 
 out by such a phrase. " We are sacrificing 
 nobody, Robespierre," he said. " We are sending 
 suspects to a fair trial." Robespierre answered 
 " Very well ! " 
 
 He put back into the fob of his silk waistcoat 
 the little brown note-book and the gilded pencil. 
 He took up his cane from the polished wood of the 
 table where it lay, but his gesture with the cane 
 betrayed the tension of his mind, for it trembled 
 in his hand as he removed it. Then when he had
 
 THERMIDOR 277 
 
 looked down a moment in silence he rose quickly 
 and went out of the room, shutting the door behind 
 him with a curious little bourgeois precision as of a 
 well-bred provincial who knows how a gentleman 
 should leave a drawing-room. 
 
 When he was gone Barrere laughed heartily. 
 Carnot swore. 
 
 Jean Bon had in his eyes a more evil light than 
 ever. 
 
 Barrere took some breadcrumbs that lay by 
 and, still laughing, rubbed out the pencil lines that 
 Robespierre had drawn across the names of these 
 two obscure men. When he had done this he 
 signed his name at the bottom of the document 
 and pushed it up the table ; Carnot signed next, 
 Jean Bon and the rest in order. The foolscap came 
 round to St. Just, and, without hesitation, St. Just 
 signed it also. It came to Couthon but Couthon, 
 his suffering face ablaze with anger, threw down 
 the pen before he had used it and hobbled from the 
 room.
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE 
 GUADARKAMA 
 
 DECEMBER 22-23, 1808 
 
 Napoleon in Madrid, believing Sir John Moore with the English 
 forces to be in Vattadolid, and rightly judging that they must 
 retreat at full speed to the sea through Astorga, determined to 
 cut them off by forced marches, the first of which took place 
 three days before Christmas 1808, and is here described. He 
 failed because his information was erroneous. Sir John Moore 
 was as a fact at Sahagun, and instead of having to march two 
 miles to Sir John's one, which he could easily achieve, success 
 demanded four an impossibility
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE 
 GUADARRAMA 
 
 DECEMBER 22-23, 1808 
 
 rilHE Sierra Guadarrama stands to the North 
 of Madrid not in a great wall but in a 
 great heave like an advancing wave. One may 
 overlook from its bare summits, which resemble 
 those of high Scotch moorlands, vast plains 
 to the south and to the north ; these plains 
 are treeless, arid and bare, their rare water- 
 courses cut down deep like trenches into the 
 friable soil. Very far away upon either horizon 
 may be distinguished further and parallel ranges 
 which guard, to the north the valley of the Ebro, 
 to the south that of the Tagus. 
 
 It is a range of heights peculiar in this, that, 
 without any abruptness of rock or savagery of 
 precipice, though most of its slopes are easily 
 accessible to man, and though they are more 
 wooded, especially in their recesses, than anything 
 in the neighbourhood beneath, something for- 
 
 281
 
 282 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 bidding and austere which at times has a note of 
 evil oppresses the spirit of a man who wanders 
 alone in their region. Here, within two days of 
 Christmas, in the year 1808, the army of Napoleon 
 was forcing its way upward into the north. 
 
 They had left Madrid at morning. The strag- 
 gling and squalid capital, on its high, windswept 
 plain, was bitterly cold, and frozen dust swept in 
 swirls down those falsely wide streets, which 
 imitate, and foolishly hnitate, in another climate and 
 for another people, the great avenues of France. 
 But though the cold of that morning was bitter 
 and the frost keen, a clear sky stretched above the 
 army ; many days' rest and the comforts of the 
 capital had given new vigour to the men. The 
 best of guns and many of them were stretched 
 here and there along the great line of marching, 
 and as a core for the whole went tall in the midst 
 the high bearskins of the Guard. 
 [ The many hours which are necessary for an 
 army to form in column and to leave a great city 
 had been consumed. The last of the line had left 
 the northern gate ; the royal road of the Spanish 
 kings, the great relic of Phillip, full of the memories 
 of the New World and of what was once a universal 
 and an untarnished glory, stretched before them 
 towards the hills. It was their business, leaving
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE GUADARRAMA 283 
 
 the Escorial to the west, to follow on and on till 
 they should take the heights themselves by the 
 new and splendid way which the Bourbons had 
 built over the mountains, and not to rest until 
 they should have camped upon the further 
 side. 
 
 The clear morning and the sharp air of that 
 exalted plateau spurred them to effort ; they were 
 gay, they were prepared for miracles ; the Em- 
 peror himself, who had not yet turned the corner 
 of this life, but was still responsive to every outer 
 impulse, tasted the wine of the weather and saw 
 before him a complete success. The map of his 
 whole strategy was clear and detailed in his mind. 
 He saw the northern towns and the river valleys, 
 the few roads, the position (as he imagined it to 
 be) of Sir John Moore. The English at Valladolid 
 would be hurrying back through Astorga to the 
 sea. Their road and his would meet at Bene- 
 vente ; he would be at Benevente first. The 
 officers of the cavalry laughed together and called 
 it " the race to Benevente," and on that issue 
 they had no doubt, for the day and the sky were 
 vigorous above them ; they were young and yet 
 all veterans together. 
 
 But Moore, far to the northward, had other 
 plans, and in Valladolid there were no English, and
 
 284 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 Benevente would not be the meeting-place of 
 battle, but of contact of escape. 
 
 So they marched northward, nearing the hills. 
 As the head of the column reached the first roll of 
 the mountain spurs it was seen that much of the 
 long range to the left was dun with a mixture, as 
 it were, of cloud and moor ; for in these fantastic 
 summits, where the skies are so different from our 
 skies, we northerners can often watch the coming 
 of a storm and wonder whether it is dust or haze of 
 cloud, or our imperfect vision, that seems to make 
 the mountains disappear into their distance, 
 fading out of a clean outline long before their 
 perspective has reached the horizon. To the 
 right also, on the heights of Somosierra (which so 
 many of the army knew from another experience), 
 there lowered wisps of darkness, and an ominous 
 thing such water as remained in the arroyos 
 under the culverts of the great road had begun 
 to rise higher and more turbid. 
 
 There is a village at the very foot of the ascent 
 where the old road turns to the Escorial and the 
 new road of the Bourbons breasts the pass. That 
 pass is not recessed as are those across greater 
 mountains, the Alps or the Pyrenees ; it is a 
 simple ascent, a few miles of plain steep road ; the 
 eye can follow the high road all the way to where
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE GUADARRAMA 285 
 
 it overcomes the range at a saddle between two 
 peaks 2000 ft. at the most above the starting- 
 point from which one gazes. It is a broadway ; 
 there are no precipices or narrows ; guns can take 
 it, if they will, two abreast and cavalry by fours ; 
 or the line, if there were such a necessity, in double 
 column. None of those perils for which soldiers 
 are prepared in high places confronted the army, 
 but suddenly something more terrible and more 
 strange, which no experience of theirs had taught 
 them to know. 
 
 The sky darkened rapidly ; the gloom spread 
 past the sun ; the nearest of things was obscured : 
 and at once from the north and the west, whistling 
 over the edges of the range, fell driving knives of 
 ice. In a few moments all that host was blinded 
 and enveloped in a torment of frozen snow. 
 
 For a while it was an exhilaration to the young 
 soldiers ; they pushed into it manfully ; they 
 joked together ; they sang their snatches of 
 Gascon or Burgundian songs ; and an Italian of 
 the Piedmontese would bandy a taunt with a 
 Provencal in some lingua franca of theirs, recalling 
 the blizzards of the Alps and the winter jests of 
 their peasants in the recesses of the Mont Genevre. 
 
 But soon the northerners found how terrible 
 was God south of the Pyrenees. The snow clogged
 
 286 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 and lay ; they could hardly lift their feet ; their 
 faces, first in intolerable pain and then numb, 
 were caked and broken. Their hands upon the 
 metal of the muskets lost their office ; there were 
 some who looked at their fingers and were astonished 
 to see the skin torn off by the metal of the trigger 
 guard and yet no blood issuing from the frozen 
 flesh. 
 
 As the day advanced the storm did not abate 
 but increased in violence. The snow deepened, 
 the cold grew more intense, and here and there a 
 rare thing in the sinuous and easy bands of Napo- 
 leon the formation was broken. Men had dropped 
 out all along the way after the first three hours of 
 this hell, preferring a numb death in the cold to 
 the agony of survival. Napoleon, his will stronger 
 than the mountains or the wind, heard their cries 
 and saw the beginnings of their mutiny. He 
 called a man to hold his bridle and dismounted, 
 though painfully, from his little horse. He had 
 ridden so far at the head of his mounted Guard ; 
 he stood by the roadside now and gave the veterans 
 time to come abreast of him ; then, with his hands 
 clasped behind his back, he pushed on afoot side 
 by side with them all, who went afoot also lead- 
 ing their horses and tramping a way for those who 
 followed; he plunged through the deepening drifts,
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE GUADARRAMA 287 
 
 his strong face level with the shoulder of some 
 Norman giant of his Pretorians. 
 
 The fury of the sky was a challenge, and, as in a 
 battle, victory was the sole solution for them all ; 
 there was no failing or compromise with death, 
 unless it was to be a rout and a disaster and a full 
 submission to the north wind. 
 
 Shots were heard close by in the driving weather, 
 sergeants cursing and hauling, men at the spokes 
 of the gun-carriage wheels : even a thing now, and 
 since then, unknown in the French Service the 
 sound of blows. But the effort was beyond 
 humanity. Here a gun stuck fast, there a limber 
 found the kennel with its off wheel, sank in and 
 overturned ; and faintly through the roar of the 
 wind or down it were threats and now and again 
 another shot, where some lad had attempted to 
 break away into the shelter of a barn or a grove, 
 or where a dying fellow had taken the opportunity 
 of such confusion for private vengeance. There 
 were spirits among the soldiery who said it openly 
 that this would cease if any man were bold 
 enough to shoot the Emperor. The Emperor 
 heard these mutineers ; he did not rebuke them ; 
 he still went on, his square chin upon his breast, 
 his sturdy legs plunging through the snow. 
 
 They came to that place where the last zigzags
 
 288 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 of the pass begin, perhaps some 800 ft. below the 
 summit ; with an effort altogether his own, he 
 moved on quicker than his Guards, and turning 
 to their foremost files shouted through the gale 
 asking them whether they remembered the con- 
 quest of the Alps that they should be conquered 
 by the molehills of Spain. The van under this 
 spur soon reached the stone lion that marks the 
 highest point of the road, and the descent began. 
 Here upon the northern side the wind, no longer 
 gusty, was full upon them with the force and 
 the push of a river, but the back of their task 
 was broken ; for an army upon the march is 
 continuous, and if the head pierces through all 
 follows. 
 
 The advance of evening on that short December 
 day increased indeed the bitterness of the cold, 
 but the wind abated in its fury. Corps after 
 corps, though guns were abandoned for a moment 
 in the drifts, though the dead and the deserters 
 had thinned the ranks, passed the stone lion of 
 the summit and began to stumble down the northern 
 side. All the great host went by. 
 
 One spot upon the road the indomitable purpose 
 of their General had fixed as the limit of their 
 march. He would not halt hitherward of that 
 limit save for a brief moment in a roadside hut, nor
 
 NAPOLEON IN THE GUADARRAMA 289 
 
 jeopardise, in spite of all the gods of the air and the 
 hills, this race of his to Benevente. 
 
 The evening fell ; it was dark upon the vanguard 
 in the plain ; it was dark on the summits where the 
 last of the waggons found an easier way from the 
 work he had compelled the pioneers to do and the 
 trampling of the snow by the Guard. It was full 
 dark, but he still marched onwards. The mass of 
 the soldiery, to whom maps are a mysterious thing, 
 and who know nothing of a march or its goal, 
 survived, in a full fashion, pouring through the 
 night, tramping half dead through little villages 
 where no halt was allowed, partly wondering and 
 partly careless as to where repose might be found 
 at the end. In such trials men mechanically go 
 forward, or go forward at least till they fall ; had 
 he taken them onwards all night through, a half at 
 least would still have been with him at dawn. 
 
 Of the fatigue duties of that night we know 
 nothing. Somehow the guard was set, somehow 
 food cooked, horses groomed and watered, arms 
 cleaned. Hour upon hour the column closed up 
 during the night till the last of the crawling units 
 had stumbled into the narrow street and the last 
 of the waggons rolled in. The discipline of those 
 armies was capable of all things ; and before the 
 men fell into a dead sleep for the few hours before 
 
 T
 
 290 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 the task should be renewed they had accomplished 
 one of the great deeds which are of perpetual 
 record among soldiers. 
 
 There have not been a dozen marches like that 
 march since the Captains of Europe began to 
 challenge one another. Yet so different is war 
 from peace that if you will retrace that road upon 
 an autumn evening you will come down at ease 
 from the summits of the sierra ; they will not seem 
 very high ; you will swing down a broad and easy 
 road on to the plains of New Castile, seeing the 
 vast horizons which the Christian conquerors saw 
 after their first great victory over the Asiatic 
 beyond the hills ; and if you are a stout walker 
 you will be in Madrid by evening, fatigued, and no 
 more than fatigued.
 
 MAY 1871 
 
 The last three days of the suppression of the Commune con- 
 sisted in charges by the Regulars against the barricade* of the 
 Communists, and among the last of these to be captured were 
 those on the slopes of Montmartre, a high isolated hill on the 
 extreme north of Paris overlooking the whole city
 
 THE BARRICADE 
 
 MAY 1871 
 
 TT is not difficult to sleep during the noise of 
 -*- firing when one has got used to it for a few 
 days. They had been used to it at Montmartre 
 continuously for forty-eight hours, and before that 
 during four long months of siege. These forty-eight 
 hours, however, had not been steady as the war had 
 been, but rather a succession without intermission of 
 rifles and of guns, and the perpetual cries of men, 
 and every kind of uproar sounding and booming 
 in the narrow streets as the tide does when it rushes 
 upon an angry day up the narrow gorges of the 
 rocks. 
 
 Through a whole night of heavy firing a butcher's 
 boy of between sixteen and seventeen had fallen 
 asleep and had slept out under the May sky, and 
 had wakened with the early dawn ; he woke to find 
 all silent. 
 
 He had been sleeping upon the roadway face 
 downwards, with his head upon his crossed arms. 
 He had drunk heavily of bad spirit the night 
 
 293
 
 294 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 before, as had all but three of the men grouped 
 about him. He staggered to his feet, and one or 
 two of those lying around were waking also. Here 
 in a threadbare frock-coat was a professor, with 
 dirty linen, haggard face, and a week's growth 
 of beard ; there a nondescript lad, but of the 
 wealthier classes, in clothes that had cost money 
 but were very greasy and torn now, with boots 
 that had burst long ago ; a third was a plain beggar 
 with very wild and staring eyes, with nothing on his 
 body but blue canvas trousers, no shoes upon his 
 feet, no coat upon his back, but a blanket huddled 
 over him. The rest were workmen of varying 
 degrees. There were twenty in all, for that was 
 the number required for a barricade of such a 
 width as theirs had, and to provide the sentries at 
 night. 
 
 The barricade was low ; it had not yet been 
 touched by shell ; it was intact save in a place 
 where, the evening before, one furious charge of the 
 Regulars had failed. There some of the lighter 
 stones had slid down, and the pole of an omnibus 
 which had been wedged into the structure lay 
 broken. For the rest, I say, it still stood, and was 
 excellent cover. Behind it, upon its northern side 
 and looking down the long street that led to the 
 plain below, a ragged sentry stood armed ; the
 
 THE BARRICADE 295 
 
 others also took their rifles, all except one, who did 
 not move when their elected chief called to him, 
 nor even when they came to move him. They 
 found he had died during the night. 
 
 A woman came out of the small shop which 
 flanked the barricade ; she was young and smiling 
 and trim, as fresh as the early morning, and one 
 would have said as gay ; she brought coffee for 
 them and would take no pence in exchange. 
 Their rations of bread they already had by them, 
 and there they sat, squatting upon the corner 
 stones, dipping their bread in the coffee, talking 
 little, and saying such words as they had to say in 
 tones that were merely weary, and using oaths 
 that had become quite conventional and thin after 
 the use of the long war. 
 
 The sun was through the mist ; the noise reminded 
 one of traffic in the old days of peace ; the noise of 
 wheels (but they were the wheels of guns) came 
 from the city below, and then, startling this group 
 upon the hill, came, not half a mile away, the sharp 
 rattle of the first fusillade. The fight had begun 
 in the workmen's quarters, eastwards, to the left 
 and below. But in that long street before them 
 nothing had yet appeared ; all the wooden 
 shutters were set fast to the windows ; all the 
 iron shutters of the shop fronts were locked and
 
 296 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 barred ; there was complete silence and a 
 complete desertion. 
 
 The place which they defended had been care- 
 fully chosen. It could not be turned save from a 
 distance which would give ample time to fall back, 
 and the first side street to enter that which they 
 held was two hundred yards or more from their 
 barricade. Out of that side street, cautiously 
 peering round the corner, and showing at first 
 nothing but a shoulder and an eye, came a marine. 
 He came out fully, and carefully surveyed the 
 barricade, the men sipping their coffee, the haggard 
 sentry at their side. He was a Breton with high 
 cheek-bones, and slow of thought, though quick 
 of eye. He wished to make his report to his 
 officer usefully and accurately. Hence he con- 
 tinued to note, one by one, the details of the 
 barricade ; its height, its structure, by what 
 windows it was commanded, and the number of 
 those who defended it. A few moments passed 
 thus : he watching, they unconscious, when, 
 all at once, he was seen. He himself saw the 
 sentry's rifle suddenly come up to the shoulder. 
 He saw it endways, and dashed back to cover 
 behind the wall. The shot failed. Then those 
 upon the barricade knelt at even distances and 
 laid the barrels of their Chassepots upon the
 
 THE BARRICADE 297 
 
 crevices between the stones, and felt in their 
 pockets for cartridges, loaded, and stood by. 
 They had not long to wait. No bugle blew ; in a 
 bunch rather than a formation the company of 
 Regulars swept round their corner into the 
 street like men flying from a danger rather than 
 like men approaching one ; somewhat separate 
 from them, and running a trifle faster than their 
 foremost man, was a quite young lieutenant, his 
 uniform so spick and span you would have thought 
 no fighting was on, and his little toy sword gleam- 
 ing sharply in the air as he cheered. Not thirty 
 shots were fired against them as they poured up 
 the hill, three only hit a man, but one of these shots 
 had struck into the very centre of the charge, another 
 had caught the lieutenant, so that even as he ran 
 forward, and even as he still cheered, he leapt 
 upwards and fell. There was a check just enough 
 to admit confusion, and during that confusion the 
 barricade steadily poured in lead ; but a gap in the 
 steady firing gave the Regulars their chance those 
 unpractised and lawless men behind the stones 
 were loading all together ; their fire for a few 
 seconds was not nourished, and in just those few 
 seconds the last yards were covered, and the rebels 
 were swarmed upon as water swarms upon the 
 little separate grains of sand when the tide
 
 298 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 rises upon the beach. There was not one behind 
 the barricade but had three men or four or five 
 upon him (for a full company had charged), and 
 for perhaps a minute the younger men struggled 
 as an animal struggles against those that hold 
 it while the others kill ; the older men had at 
 once gone down. The professor was not killed 
 but caught ; they already had torn off and bound a 
 strip of his own linen tightly around his wrists 
 behind his back, so that his hands were swelling 
 out and blue with congested blood. And in the 
 midst of all this savagery, the youngest of them 
 was shouting as he died some screamed disjointed 
 syllables of a chance revolutionary song. The red 
 flag still stood above the blood of the defeat, 
 knotted on to a tall stick planted in the stones ; 
 no one had thought to take it away. Far off up 
 the hill two men were seen running ; why, no 
 one knows or ever will know. Whether they were 
 the rebels, or chance comers, or whatever they 
 were, they were dropped like rabbits, and those 
 were the last shots fired. 
 
 This is the way the barricade was taken. It 
 was still quite, quite early in the morning, the 
 spring air was still quite pure and clean ; no 
 smoke was yet rising from those further quarters of
 
 THE BARRICADE 299 
 
 the city below which the Law had recovered two 
 days before. From the moment when the marine 
 had first taken his little look to that in which the 
 last two shots had dropped the runaways, about 
 five minutes altogether had passed. 
 
 So much for what happened in 1871 ; one of the 
 hundred things that happened, each very much 
 like all the others during that astonishing re- 
 conquest of the town. . . . But if I were to end 
 here I should not be telling quite all the story, 
 nor helping my readers to understand altogether 
 the true character of these foreign men. 
 
 Exactly thirty years later, in a villa close to the 
 River Seine, near Mantes, I dined with a man who 
 was brother to this young lieutenant who had 
 been killed, and there was present an old and 
 rather decrepit gentleman of the University who 
 had been among those upon the barricade and who 
 had been captured ; he had been condemned to 
 death, transported, a refugee in London, amnestied 
 and was now still working at his mathematics in 
 the Rue des Ecoles ; he no longer lectured, but he 
 still gave private lessons. And these two, all 
 during dinner, would talk of nothing else but the 
 Commune : my host, whose brother had been hit 
 among the Regulars during the charge, condemn- 
 ing it ; the aged professor, upon the other hand,
 
 300 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 defending its ideal with all his strength. It was 
 a heated argument. Neither understood how to 
 reconcile party differences with the harmony of 
 social life; for quite an hour they angrily de- 
 bated the past. Later, however, they turned 
 to talk of fishing, and it relieved me, for I am not 
 used to political debate, nor had I ever clearly 
 known what the Commune was all about.
 
 THE POLITICIAN 
 
 JANUARY 11 1 1906 
 
 On December 5, 1905, Mr. Balfour's Administration, 
 which had carried to a successful and prosperous conclusion 
 the South African War, and had admitted the Boer Republics 
 into our Imperial system, went to the country. During the 
 General Election following many meetings were held, and 
 among them this, in a northern town, upon January 11, 
 1906
 
 THE POLITICIAN 
 
 JANUARY 11, 1906 
 
 "VTTHAT happened on this day happened in a 
 large hall which had been built in the 
 beginning of our younger generation, just when iron 
 was coming into use for building. Its architecture 
 was of the style which may be called masonic. 
 Sham half-columns stood against the high walls, 
 supporting nothing ; their nondescript and hideous 
 capitals were heavily gilded with some staring metal. 
 From the roof hung great lights which had been 
 designed for gas but now carried incandescent bulbs. 
 It was evening and light glared all over the great 
 oblong and the astonishing red and blue pattern of 
 the roof. There were perhaps three thousand people 
 in this place, nearly all poor, and most of them 
 dressed as the poor are dressed in this country 
 that is, anyhow. The gallery which ran around 
 the hall was packed, and in the darkness under it 
 young men and boys stood in close ranks. In 
 the body of the hall, by a custom peculiar to 
 Great Britain, many women of the middle class 
 
 303
 
 304 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 were sprinkled, and the first front rows of chairs 
 were filled with people of somewhat greater wealth 
 than the mass ; their faces were solemn, their 
 eyes unobservant and slow. Before and above 
 all these thousands, at the end of the great hall, 
 was a vast platform of wood, like a stage. There 
 was an organ upon it, very high, reaching to the 
 roof, the gift of some one or other who had got 
 wealth rapidly in the gambling and cheating of our 
 time. There was further upon this platform a table 
 covered with a red cloth, and two long rows of chairs. 
 So long as the platform remained empty, a German 
 with mild features played upon the organ to 
 entertain the populace. But when a small side 
 door opened and the head of a sort of small proces- 
 sion appeared, he ceased, and the dying away of 
 his music was succeeded by storms of cheers. Of 
 all those thousands more than half rose to their 
 feet, and then others and others till nearly all 
 were standing, and the shrill cries of the women 
 were very audible above the other noises. At 
 the corner of the gallery above the platform a 
 young, lean, dark-haired man with fierce eager 
 eyes, hissed continually : this noise also was 
 noticeable among the rest. 
 
 The recipients of this public clamour filed slowly 
 on to the stage. First came an elderly and corpu-
 
 THE POLITICIAN 305 
 
 lent man in a narrow shirt-front shaped like a V, 
 and having on the waistcoat of his evening clothes 
 a giantic golden chain. He was bald, his beard 
 was white, and he turned round continually as 
 though making obeisance to those who followed. 
 These were a man of middle age with hair as light 
 as straw and watery weak eyes ; another of Jewish 
 blood, with crisp hair, quick, alert face, and an 
 air of decision about him. 
 
 Both of these last were Lords, and with them came 
 the central figure of that evening, the Politician. 
 
 This man was not yet fifty. His eyes perpetually 
 roved from point to point of the hall as he came 
 in. His features were determined and strong, 
 but his mouth unsteady ; it moved as nervously 
 as did his eyes, and he clasped and unclasped his 
 hands continually. His frame was well built 
 it was evident his health was good. His walk and 
 manner and everything about him betrayed an 
 intense concentration of interest in one thing, and 
 might equally be said to have betrayed an ignorance 
 of all others. This thing was the old complex and 
 curious scheme of political action with its vague 
 ceaseless phrases, its connotation of great wealth, 
 the partial immunity of its actors from the action 
 of law, and the pleasures of administration and of 
 distant praise which it can bring ; nor could any 
 
 u
 
 306 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 one have said, not even she who had borne him 
 (and who still lived), which of the varied aspects of 
 this old moribund thing pleased him most. For it 
 all pleased him : the praise the architecture of 
 Westminster the little feminine intrigues the 
 greasiness of officials the work in Whitehall the 
 money. But on the whole, perhaps most of all 
 the money. He was long past that phase in such 
 a life when the future may be doubtful : he was 
 secure. But twenty-five years filled with poignant 
 anxiety in the pursuit of that which he had attained 
 had left him as I have said, unable to control his 
 eyes or his hands. 
 
 After him trooped in the notabilities who were 
 to sit upon the platform. Some of these also 
 (as the modern national custom demands) were 
 women. One Was of the very centre of the govern- 
 ing class, the wife of the Jewish peer. The others 
 were women of the middle classes, and the differ- 
 ence between the two was very noticeable, for the 
 aristocrat did everything with a studied ease and 
 repose, indistinguishable from that of an actress, 
 while those of the middle class suffered somewhat. All 
 these women were dressed in an expensive manner. 
 
 The corpulent man who presided upon that 
 evening rose and spoke a few minutes in a husky 
 voice, introducing the principal figure which sat
 
 THE POLITICIAN 807 
 
 there next him, behind the red table, smiling" (and 
 smiling nervously) at the crowd. 
 
 When the corpulent man corpulently sat down, 
 there was a great clapping of hands which lasted 
 almost as long as had his little speech ; and when the 
 Politician rose the cheering began again as it had 
 when he entered. There was the same roar of 
 welcome and pride from the thousands, the same 
 shrill noise from the women, and the same long hiss 
 from the young eager man who favoured not the 
 Politician but his uncle and brother who sat 
 opposite him in the House of Commons. For 
 this young man worked all day long amid the noise 
 of machines, drank tea, ate ill-cooked food, and 
 at night, by a gas-jet in his bare room, read books 
 written by German atheists, but translated into 
 English and sold at sixpence. These taught him 
 the nature and origin of all things : and in his view 
 the Politician was the champion of all things evil, 
 but his brother and his uncle the champions of 
 all things good. 
 
 The Politician, still smiling nervously, put 
 up one hand to moderate too great a zeal 
 in the affection of his fellow citizens : 
 when the shouting came to an end, he began to 
 speak. 
 
 His voice was singularly pleasing. It was
 
 308 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 modulated in many tones, and had in it a sort 
 of sympathy, as though he were speaking to one, 
 and not to many ; yet not his voice was the chief 
 wonder, but the things he said with it. 
 
 He told them first how fateful was the moment, 
 for that England had now to choose between the 
 two principles upon which the fate of nations 
 invariably depended ; and pointed out the imme- 
 diate disasters which would follow the one choice 
 (to which his audience Was not inclined), and the 
 great life of vision and of splendour which would 
 follow the other course, to which they were already 
 pledged. 
 
 When he had thus emphasised the greatness of 
 the great occasion on which they found themselves, 
 he proceeded to relate their qualities and virtues, 
 showing how judgment, patriotism, a readiness 
 for sacrifice and an aptitude to do had ever 
 characterised themselves and him. Nor did he 
 omit to add that these advantages were in part 
 due to the special and peculiar affection which 
 their Creator felt for such as himself and them. 
 And this, to the accompaniment of shouts of 
 agreement he exemplified, contrasting their greater 
 wealth, their more sober lives, their keener intelli- 
 gence, their far more conspicuous courage against 
 the lesser and meaner accidents of foreigners and
 
 THE POLITICIAN 309 
 
 while he admitted that in all these his audience 
 and himself were nearly approached by the people 
 of the United States, whom he called Anglo- 
 Saxons, and whom he affirmed to be the cousins 
 of himself and of those who heard him, yet he 
 would not yield a palm even to these. 
 
 He had now spoken for forty minutes, and 
 approached more definite themes. For an hour 
 he debated the importance of a certain law 
 which had something of magical power in its 
 mere name. The effect of the law was such 
 that the rich and poor would remain in their 
 respective stations ; every time the name of that 
 law escaped him, the great audience was moved 
 as though by music. 
 
 He would, from time to time, lift from a small 
 pile of sheets upon the table a quotation from the 
 words of an opponent or a colleague, concerning 
 this matter, reading those of his brother and his 
 more famous uncle with a fine ring of contempt, 
 as of something hateful ; but those of his first 
 cousin, his private secretary, and his mother's 
 second husband with the sound approval of a 
 judgment fixed and secure . 
 
 The great dead also were pressed into his service, 
 and he quoted the names of those who had left 
 their unmistakable stamp upon that sort of
 
 310 THE EYE-WITNESS 
 
 occupation in which he was himself for the moment 
 occupied, and who, like himself, enjoyed the money, 
 the security and the vivacious play that accompany 
 this form of achievement. 
 
 These great names he used also in another 
 manner, which was to obtain repose. For when 
 his voice weakened a little, he had but to mention 
 in a loud and particular manner one of three or 
 four speakers who would, were they now alive, 
 presumably stand in his division of public action, 
 to obtain many minutes of clapping and shouting 
 during which his voice might take rest. He ended 
 with a sentence the intonation of which was that 
 of the clergy when they are in pursuit of their 
 professional affairs, and the words composing 
 which were no less than a catalogue of the great 
 virtues, I mean tolerance, mercy, justice, courage, 
 the love of freedom and the service of one's country. 
 He sat down to the accompaniment of more noise, 
 as prolonged as that to which he had risen ; and 
 the young man at the corner of the gallery forgot 
 to hiss, so profoundly had the speech impressed 
 his soul. 
 
 The pale European Lord rose, and told a 
 humorous story to illustrate his position. The 
 audience who had often heard this story before 
 laughed with a familiar pleasure.
 
 THE POLITICIAN 311 
 
 The Jewish Lord spoke next, lisping a little, 
 but making his points clear. They also concerned 
 the greatness of the virtues of those before him. 
 
 Next a woman spoke in a tender manner, and 
 brought in the person of the Sovereign and the 
 Royal Family. Nor did she omit to bring in also 
 a detail of morals, on which she was unfortunately 
 mad. 
 
 The corpulent gentleman asked for questions, 
 and a burly man standing at the back of the hall 
 asked the Politician whether nations did not 
 prosper under the conditions of justice, freedom 
 and toleration ? The reply was in the affirmative. 
 
 A little, excitable man next jumped up, and 
 began a violent harangue against usury and was 
 thrown out ; but not without great difficulty, 
 for his energy was amazing. 
 
 A pawnbroker proposed a vote of thanks to the 
 chairman. Next poetry was proposed the 
 audience sang, the platform passed away, and all 
 departed, some fighting at the doors. 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE & Co. LIMITED 
 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, Londoa
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 GAYLOHD 
 
 PRINTED IN U.S.*.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 655 669 o