The Road

by Hilaire Belloc

iii

The political cause of diversion has been, as I say, the negative effect of an absence of grand strategy in modern times. There has been no grand strategy in this country since the Romans, because there has been no fighting of a highly-organized type within the island during the whole of its post-Roman history. There was a great deal of barbaric fighting in the Dark Ages, and a great deal of feudal fighting in the Middle Ages. Even in the beginning of modern organized warfare you had (on a very small scale, it is true) the civil wars.

But since then—that is, during the whole of the period in which modern road systems have developed (1660 onwards)—there has been no necessity for strategical considerations to affect the English road system at all, and, therefore, no political force strong enough to compel direct roads was present in opposition to the strong economic motive for diversion.

The result is an anomaly that might well become serious if we had to depend upon our road system under the threat of invasion. Look, for instance, at the two great handicaps, the Humber and the Thames. A force standing up to meet a threatened landing which might be directed against Kent or against East Anglia would be divided into two sections, deprived of road communication save round through London. During the War a temporary bridge was thrown across the Thames (in the neighbourhood of Tilbury, if I remember aright), but, of course, with a gate for traffic. In normal times you could not have such a thing. The water traffic is too great and too confused. But what you could have would be a tunnel, and though the necessity for it may never arise it is also true that should it arise we shall bitterly regret not having driven that tunnel. The same remark applies with even greater force to the Humber. An attempted landing on the north-east coast of England, threatening alternatively the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire coasts, would find the defending force cut in two, and were the strategics of this position to become acute we should regret the lack of a road tunnel under the Humber, just as we should regret the lack of a road tunnel under the Thames.

The third principal case, that of the Severn, is partially met by a railway tunnel—the Severn Tunnel, far below Gloucester. A road tunnel would hardly suggest itself here. There is not a sufficient “potential” for it on either side of the stream. But here again it might well happen that under the particular circumstances of war we should regret the absence of it.

This negative factor, the absence of a strategic “driving motive,” has also left the windings of the internal road system at the mercy of the easiest crossings of the rivers, and we see how different the thing would have been under a strategic scheme. Consider the Roman contrast. The Roman roads of Britain were principally military. The whole scheme of Roman government was military, and the life of all that civilization was founded on the army. With the marching of men rapidly and easily from place to place as the main motive of the builders, the roads follow those great straight lines which, while duly seeking a formula of minimum effort, never sacrificed to it directness of plan. As we have seen, even at the great estuaries Roman engineers preferred a supplementary ferry to continue the road rather than deflecting it round by the first bridge.

In this connection, however—that of estuaries—there is one case which is puzzling: the case of the Thames. An explanation can, I think, be found, though at first it looks anomalous. The Romans dealt with the estuary of the Severn and of the Humber by ferries; they dealt by long bridges with lesser obstacles. In the same fashion they carried the north road over the Trent by a direct line without deflection for a special crossing. They carried it across the Tyne at deep water approached steeply. They carried it across the Thames at Staines with a sole regard to the direction of their road and without considering special opportunities of crossing. They did the same at Dorchester; and instances could be multiplied all over the kingdom. But apparently they did not attempt to attack the Thames estuary.

When one considers the nature of the early fighting during the first conquest of the island by the Romans this is astonishing. All the campaigns began in Kent, and the more serious of them were carried on into East Anglia. The great rising under Nero was an East Anglian rising, and the Roman armies beaten there had to be rapidly reinforced from Kent. For 400 years troops poured in, under any special emergency, from Dover, came up through Kent, and any immediate necessity of reaching a point east of London necessitated a détour by London Bridge: though time might be vital, the deflection was suffered.

Why did the Romans not solve the difficulty and establish at least a ferry across the lower Thames? Of course, they may have done so. You can never argue from the absence of traces to-day that a Roman road did not exist, for it is astonishing how thoroughly time eliminates such things. There are whole great towns like Aquilea and Hippo of which not even the foundations remain to-day. Even in England, where Roman survival is most marked, two towns, Silchester and Uriconium, have gone save for a few ruins; and there are great stretches of Roman road in every country of Western Europe which have mysteriously and wholly disappeared without leaving a trace of the tremendous work undertaken to build them; for instance, the miles after Epsom racecourse. Still, it does look as though no direct Roman line connected Canterbury, for instance, with Colchester. And I say again, how are we to account for it?

I think the explanation lies in the disposition of the marsh lands on the lower Thames. If you take the map of the Thames below the Isle of Dogs and mark upon it all that must have been primeval marsh (including much that is still marsh) you will see that wherever hard land is found upon one bank it is faced by extensive swamp upon the other. There was no good position for a permanent crossing even by ferry, and in the whole military history of England we only know one doubtful case in which a junction was effected from south to north, which is in the pursuit of the defeated British army by the Romans in A.D. 43 under Aulus Plautius. If, as is probable (though not certain), that battle took place at Rochester, then the pursuit was carried on by a direct crossing of the lower Thames; but with that exception I can call to mind no military action in the whole of our history where the lower Thames did not prove a permanent obstacle.

It is an amusing speculation to think what would have happened to the road system of England if strategic necessity had appeared again during the modern period. The thing is purely hypothetical, but I might make a few suggestions.

In the first place, we should certainly have had a road linking up the southern coast; next, we should certainly have had some form of continuous traffic over the lower Severn and the lower Thames and the Humber; next, without doubt, there would have been pierced a broad, continuous, and fairly direct road from the plain of Yorkshire to the plain of Lancashire across the Pennines; next, we should have had, of course, a broadening of all the ways leading to the main ports. That would have been essential, and particularly to the ports of the Straits of Dover. But, as I have said, the whole thing is a dream, because not that strategic motive, but now a purely economic motive is compelling us to revise our system.