Hilaire Belloc

“ Only half the regiment was to halt at Bar-le-Duc. But six batteries, thirty-six guns, their men, horses, apparatus, forges, and waggons occupying and advancing in streams over a valley are a wonderful sight. Clouds of dust and the noise of the metal woke the silent places of the Meuse, and sometimes river birds would rise and wheel in the air as the clamour neared them. Far off a lonely battery was coming down the western slope to join the throng in its order, and for some reason their two trumpets were still playing the march and lending to this great display the unity of music. ”

“ In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles of a later age.
Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world—a power which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human fate. ”

“ Before I knew well that she was round, the sea was yellow like a pond, the waves no longer heaved, but raced and broke as they do upon a beach. One greener, kindly and roaring, a messenger of the gale grown friendly after its play with us, took us up on its crest and ran us into the deep and calm beyond the bar, but as we crossed, the gravel ground beneath our keel. So the boat made harbour. Then, without hesitation, she cast herself upon the mud, and I, sitting at the tiller, my companion ashore, and pushing at her inordinate sprit, but both revelling in safety, we gave thanks and praise. ”

“ Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.
Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea so inconspicuously.
The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in battle—violent and heroic. The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy sea. ”

“ Accustomed to the contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky; men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us; till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. ”

“ Down on that level, out from the dyke to the uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at random on a woman's work-table by the wind. ”

“ Up above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by what seems one vast wall—and more than twenty towers. Indeed, it is at such a time, in early morning, and best in winter when the frost defines and chisels every outline, that Carcassonne should be drawn. ”

“ All the way down the gorge for miles, sawing its cut in sheer surfaces through the rock, crashes a violent stream, and all the valley is full of its thunder. But it is so continuous, so sedulous, that it becomes part of oneself. One does not lose it at night as one falls asleep, nor does one recover it in the morning, when dreams are disturbed by a little stir of life in the undergrowth and one opens one's eyes to see above one the bronze of the dawn. ”

“ THE SLANT OFF THE LAND
We live a very little time. Before we have reached the middle of our time perhaps, but not long before, we discover the magnitude of our inheritance. Consider England. How many men, I should like to know, have discovered before thirty what treasures they may work in her air? She magnifies us inwards and outwards; her fields can lead the mind down towards the subtle beginning of things; the tiny irridescence of insects; the play of light upon the facets of a blade of grass. ”

“ Wooden beds with curtains around them, feathers for sleeping on, and every decent thing which the accursed would attempt to destroy; candles (I trust) —and trust is more perfect than proof—bread made (if it be possible) out of English wheat; milk drawn most certainly from English cows, and butter worthy of the pastures of England all around. Oh, glory to the Fens, Griffin, it shall not be said that I have not enjoyed you!
There is a modern habit, I know, of gloom, and men without faith upon every side recount the things that they have not enjoyed. ”

“ Each of the Causses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of rock consonant to the wild spirit of its isolation; but the Causse of Mende holds a kind of fortress—a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, even in full daylight, you expect the footsteps of men; and by night, as you go gently, in fear of waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly among built houses and spires. This place the peasants of the canons have called "The Old City"; and no one living will go near it who knows it well. ”

“ For March and the Griffin were not twenty miles away. And still the great ditch stood between me and my pilgrimage.
These dykes of the Fens are accursed things: they are the separation of friends and lovers. Here is a man whose crony would come and sit by his fireside at evening and drink with him, a custom perhaps of twenty years' standing, when there comes another man from another part armed with public power, and digs between them a trench too wide to leap and too soft to ford. The Fens are full of such tragedies. ”

“ He may have learnt the mountains by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and many crossings of the main chain by those precipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees more like a paling than a mountain crest, but though he should know them thoroughly all the way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the Cerdagne will only appear to him the more astonishing. It renews in any man however familiar he may be with great mountains, the impressions of that day when he first saw the distant summits and thought them to be clouds. ”

“ In all that enormous story of Rome, from the dim Etrurian origins right up to the end of her thousand years, the Wall of the Town was more sacred than the limits of the Empire.
The men of the Desert do not understand these things. They are by compulsion nomad, and for ever wandering; they strike no root; their pride is in mere expansion; they must colonise or fail; nor does any man die for a city.
As I looked from the mountain I thought the Desert which I had come so far to see had explained to me what hitherto I had not understood in the mischances of Europe. ”

“ Beams of comfort and great age; drowsy and inhabiting fires; ingle-nooks made for companionship. You also, beer much better, much more soft, than the beer of lesser towns; beans, bacon, and chicken cooked to the very limit of excellence; port drawn from barrels which the simple Portuguese had sent to Lynn over the cloud-shadowed sea, and honourable Lynn without admixture had sent upon a cart to you, port undefined, port homogeneous, entirely made of wine: you also beds! ”

“ Just opposite the house a great tomb marked the fall of some hero. The wind seemed less violent. The waters of the marshy plain had gathered. They were no longer frozen, and a little brook ran by. As I waited there, hesitating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at their great door. They opened, and light poured upon the road, and the noise of peasants talking loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire. In this way I ended my crossing of these sombre and unrecorded hills. ”

“ There is one little corner of England; here is another.
The Isle of Ely lying on the fens is like a starfish lying on a flat shore at low tide. Southward, westward, and northward from the head or centre of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) it throws out arms every way, and these arms have each short tentacles of their own. In between the spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the crest of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run the roads. Long ago there was but one road of these that linked up the Isle with the rest of England. ”

“ One sees at what a height one was in that plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the main range dominates the world; for down below one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the mountains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see unexpectedly beneath you the approach from France into Spain. The gulf at its narrowest is tremendous; but, more than that, when the floor of the valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away down and down by runs and by cascades towards the very distant plains of the north, upon which the funnel debouches. ”

“ That mixture of the truth, and of a subtle unreal glamour which expands and confirms the truth, is a mixture proper to our hazy landscapes, to our drowsy woods, and to our large vision. We, who so often see from our high village squares soft and distant horizons, mountains now near, now very far, according as the weather changes: we, who are perpetually feeling the transformation of the seasons, and who are immersed in a very ocean of manifold and mysterious life, we need, create, and live by legends. The line between the real and imaginary is vague and penumbral to us. ”

“ I saw under the curve of my headsail the long and hazy line, which is the only frontier of England; the plain that rather marries with than defies her peculiar seas. For it was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the coastline of my own country, that these thoughts rose in me during the calm at the end of winter, and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than I knew upon the ebb of the outer tide. ”

“ On the summit of this cliff I lay and looked down upon the sand. It was impressed upon my mind that here was an influence quite peculiar, not to be discovered in any other climate of the world; that all Europe received that influence, and yet that no one in Europe had accepted it save for his hurt.
God forbid that any man should pretend that the material environment of mankind determines the destiny of mankind. Those who say such things have abandoned the domain of intelligence. ”

“ Over its sky there follow in stately order the great white clouds of summer, and at evening the haze is lit just barely from below with that transforming level light which is the joy and inspiration of the Netherlands. Against such an expanse stands up for ever one of the gigantic but delicate belfries, round which these towns are gathered. For Holland, it seems, is not a country of villages, but of compact, clean towns, standing scattered over a great waste of grass like the sea. ”

“ From the summit the view has two interests—of colour and of the past. You have below you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen stones: the whole field is an arrangement of different culture and of bright rocks and sand; and below you, also, in a curve, is all that coast which at the close of the Roman Empire was, perhaps, the wealthiest in Europe. In the extreme north a man might make out upon a clear day the bulk of Narbonne. Perpignan is close by; the little rock harbour of Venus, Port Vendres, is to the south. ”

“ This belfrey of Delft is a thing by itself in Europe, and all these truths can be said of it by a man who sees it for the first time: first, that its enormous height is drawn up, as it were, and enhanced by every chance stroke that the instinct of its slow builders lit upon; for these men of the infinite flats love the contrast of such pinnacles, and they have made in the labour of about a thousand years a landscape of their own by building, just as they have made by ceaseless labour a rich pasture and home out of those solitary marshes of the delta. ”

“ Foxes are hunted in the Valley of the Rother, but there are not very many. Pheasants and partridges are shot, but I never heard of great bags; one animal indeed there is in profusion. The rabbit swarms and exults in this life of Southern England. Do you stalk him? He sits and watches you. Do you hunt him with dogs? He thinks it a vast bother about a very little matter. Do you ferret him? He dies, and rejoices to know that so many more will take his place. The rabbit is the sacred emblem of my river, and when we have a symbol, he shall be our symbol. ”

“ He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of his mowing are always the same. ”

“ And if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and some such satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good world. I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood."
But he answered: "No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which you speak. And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers that run here under the combes of home." ”

“ Then the boom went over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered hills.
Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind—and the boat made three. ”

“ In another house near the church I saw a roof that might have been a roof for a town. It covered the living part and the stables, and the outhouse and the brewhouse, and the barns, and for all I know the pig-pens and the pigeons' as well. It was a benediction of a roof—a roof traditional, a roof patriarchal, a roof customary, a roof of permanence and unity, a roof that physically sheltered and spiritually sustained, a roof majestic, a roof eternal. ”

“ For, though I did not know it, the ebb of the great spring tide had carried me right away down Channel, and there was not twelve feet of water under the keel, for the seething of the sea that I noticed came from the Varne—the Varne, that curious, long, steep hill, with its twin ridge close by, the Colbert; they stand right up in the Channel between France and England; they very nearly lift their heads above the waves. ”