ON THE EVOLUTION OF UNFORTIFIED BRIDGES

I

Brangwyn’s water-colour of the Pont Henri IV at Châtellerault, over the Vienne, represents a bridge built and fortified by an architect of the Renaissance, Charles Androuet du Cerceau. Here is a fact to be remembered, for Androuet du Cerceau was perhaps the latest European bridge-builder who tried to fit his work into a nation’s policy of defence. From his time onward to our own no high road conducted over a river has been made in any respect a military way, safeguarded from the dangers of war, at least as much as possible.

If Androuet du Cerceau had been asked to foretell the development of bridge-building, his answer could not have been less militant than the Pont Henri IV; he would have said that bridges, like battleships and fortified places, would continue to oppose the science of military attack, because their safety would be affected by all improvements in the methods and materials employed by armies. His view of life and art, as we see it in his work, has been the view of all thoughtful craftsmen. He believed that the genius of invention, age after age, set up her home in the ablest minds, and passed through an ordered growth, till at last she attained her culmination. As long as improvements could be made in the action of aggressive war, counter improvements could be made in the reaction of defence, for the art of inventing each new weapon would suggest a means by which its utility in war might be thwarted, and perhaps nullified.

But I do not think that Androuet du Cerceau realised to the full what competent bridges ought to have been to his generation. He was too mediæval in his attitude to strife, and this defect was perhaps inevitable. You see, the Pont Henri IV was erected between the years 1564 and 1609; and during these forty-five years the spirit of the times was dead against an efficient strategy both in defence and in attack. Soldiers of every rank were passing through a transition, unaided by much enthusiasm. Indeed, new methods were hated rather than liked, because they seemed to be less chivalric, or what the French called less “heroic,” than were the ancient methods, though many of these had grown obsolescent. Alexandre Dumas wrote several delightful books on this period in the evolution of fighting, when gunpowder was a war-god that no brave man was at all eager to worship before an altar of unwieldy firearms. Soldiers liked a battle to be a duel at very close quarters, so they were not amused when they fired through a fog of suffocating smoke, and coughed and sneezed in a chorus, while tears dripped from their eyes. Here and there, of course, while Androuet du Cerceau was engaged upon his bastille bridge, “villainous saltpetre” had some ardent followers. Turn to the military writers of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, for instance, and read the long dispute that went on between the old school and the new. Some experts had a firm belief in the old archery statutes, while others put their trust in ponderous firearms that went off after much coaxing and never carried straight for a hundred yards.

PONT HENRI IV OVER THE VIENNE AT CHÂTELLERAULT IN FRANCE BUILT BY CHARLES ANDROUET DU CERCEAU, 1504-1609. TILL 1624 THE TWO GREAT TOWERS WERE UNITED BY A PAVILION FORMING A GATEWAY. ONE OF THE LATEST OF THE BASTILLE BRIDGES

In those days there were two handguns, both rather old, and their improvement baffled the ingenuity of gunsmiths. One was the petronel or arquebuse, which had come into vogue in 1480; the other was the musket, which in 1521, or thereabouts, was brought into use by the Emperor Charles V, who believed in it because he had never tried to hold the “kicking demon” through a battle. For a long time petronels were discharged by a lighted match, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century a wheel-lock was invented, to be superseded at last—about the year 1692—by the flint-lock. Progress was exceedingly halt-footed; but one day a pious clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Forsythe, happened to be startled by a very profane idea; it seemed to him that gunpowder in a musket might be ignited by a percussion cap. Good Forsythe! Being very practical as well as pious (these two qualities go together like body and soul, as a rule), he patented his mother-idea, A.D. 1807; and in less than thirty years the principle of the percussion cap was accepted by the War Office, though public opinion in England cooed over Peace, believing that henceforth mankind would be satisfied with continual wars between Capital and Labour. There is no need to sketch the equally slow improvements in the manufacture of cannon. Enough to say that among Wellington’s siege artillery in Spain there were Spanish guns dating from the Armada period.

Briefly, then, from Androuet du Cerceau’s time onward to the year 1857, when the old musket Brown Bess was put aside for ever, the dilatory progress of attack in war gave bridge-builders every opportunity of keeping pace with it and of making their defence as thorough as possible. Yet nothing was done. Not even a single effort was made to evolve the old war-bridge into a modernised protection; and it is very far from easy to explain this quite sudden departure from a very old routine of defensive forethought. Several reasons have been given, of course, but they have no backbone and no brain. It was argued, for example, that bridges were as advantageous to an attack as to a defence, so the whole strategy of war would protect them quite enough. Even in our own time this very queer argument has been advocated, as if to prove that minds as well as eyes often suffer from astigmatism. What successful army is not hindered and harassed by guarding many hundreds of defenceless bridges? And what modern army in retreat has ever failed to leave behind it an extra rearguard of broken bridges?

Let me give but one example. Sir John Moore could never have made his terrible march from Sahagun to Coruña, but for his good fortune in the matter of rivers and bridges. When Napoleon himself got within striking reach, near Benavente, on the torrent Esla, Moore’s rearguard blew up three spans of the old bridge of Castro Gonzalo; and when the cavalry of the Imperial Guard found a deep crossing and forded the river into a wide poplared plain, Paget and the 10th Hussars galloped through their broken ranks, destroying half of them, and capturing their general Lefebvre Desnouettes. Much later, when the narrow and snowbound Pass of Piedrafita was littered with dead British troops, all killed by hunger and cold and exhaustion, Moore was befriended by the great Roman bridge of Constantino, and by the noble viaduct of Corcul between Nogales and Becerrea. Paget was left behind with the rearguard, and in brilliant actions at the bridges he checked the pursuit, while Moore marched on toward Lugo. If a French spy had blown up the bridge of Constantino and the viaduct, after hearing of Moore’s approach, the British would have been brought to a standstill, and from a desperate position there would have been little chance of escape. So the viaduct and the Roman bridge stood between victory and defeat; they saved the British and baffled the French. In fact, Moore reached Lugo without much further harrying.

Not only is there a bridge of Constantino in all campaigns, but we may be sure that as no country will ever wish to be invaded the airmen scouts of the future will try to destroy all bridges beyond their own frontiers, so as to cripple the enemy’s prearranged movements. Defeat in the near future may be nothing more than a paralysis of communications, caused by bridge-wrecking airships and aeroplanes. Try to imagine what we should suffer, if we lost in a single night eight or ten of the bridges that help to unite London to Edinburgh and Glasgow. To lose the Forth Bridge alone would be a bad defeat; and yet, as I have said, there are people still who argue that bridges need no protection because their utility in war is invaluable to both sides.[136]

This hollow argument was very active during the ferment of the Renaissance, which became to architecture what a political party spirit is to an army. In fact, it was the Renaissance that produced the disintegrating party strife of rival “styles,” and soon the followers of classic forms and ceremonies were more powerful than their opponents, who believed in the native genius of Gothic art. The aim of our classic men was to renew under our Northern sky an alien inspiration born and bred in the ardent climates of Greece and of Rome. In other words, they wished to repeat, by plodding and self-conscious effort, what Rome had done in architecture with the patient and slow methods of her colonisation. In this way they appealed to everybody who tried to seem erudite, and their endeavours entered that world of educated fashion where a false quantity was a greater sin than intemperance. Just as the chatty, delightful Montaigne wanted to hide his genius among profuse gleanings from ancient writers, so most architects believed that they could do no good in life unless they tried to be Greek or Roman. Progress was no longer an organic growth, it was a copied fashion, an inconvenient mode. Not even a church could be built without help from pagan temples. Not an equestrian statue could be modelled unless a Christian of sorts, either king or warrior, put on the costume of a Cæsar, and then straddled ill at ease across the back of a reasonable horse, which alone merited the long life of bronze. Amid this ferment of comic priggishness and pedantry young men served their apprenticeship, and became artists and craftsmen. Inevitably, bridge-builders were affected, and as prigs most of them did their work as public servants.

One remarkable thing was the fussy interest that their projects excited. During the eighteenth century, for instance, a ridiculous ado was made about bridge-building. Voluntary guidance came from mathematicians, and chatter and hesitation implied that at last, for the first time in the history of the world, a reputable bridge would be erected. As for the results of all this flutter and fuss, they were usually out of joint with the public interests that bridges ought to have served efficiently. No attention was paid to military defence, and some famous men blundered like amateurs. Perronet was regarded as the most expert bridge-builder of his time; his knowledge was prodigious, and yet he made astounding mistakes, which would have shamed such mediæval masters as Bénézet and Isembert. As an example I will mention his Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine, which was finished in 1772.[137] The delicate operation of striking the centres, by freeing the arches from their supports, was begun only eighteen days after the keystones were put in their places, when the mortar was not yet hard enough to resist new pressure. In one great arch the crown sank twenty-three inches—truly a historic mishap, and for several reasons. The upper part of this arch in Perronet’s plan was an arc of a circle 320 ft. in diameter; after the mishap it became an arc of a circle whose diameter would be 518 ft., hence a stone arch of this size—518 ft. on the chord line—might be constructed! No wonder that writers have been astounded by the Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine, for it passed safely through a most dangerous experience. Perronet was saved, not by his good design, nor by his mathematical calculations, but by a rare stroke of good luck. Indeed, there are a good many technical faults in his work at Neuilly. The piers are only fourteen feet broad, too small to be in scale with the wide arches, and all lateral pressure travels along the bridge to the abutments. If one arch were cut the others would be endangered. In later years Perronet became wise, and told the French Government that two or three arches in every long bridge should have abutment piers, as a safeguard against mishaps in war.[138]

Several famous engineers had to learn by experience, like Perronet, that a self-conscious desire to be “scientific” had dangers of its own in bridge-building. Smeaton’s bridge over the Tyne at Hexham was a tragic failure; Labelye produced a very perishable bridge on the Thames at Westminster; and learned engineering did not save the Tay Bridge from catastrophe, though science welcomed it with a din of confident approval.

The Tay Bridge was a railway track to connect the town of Dundee and the North British Railway System in Fife; it crossed the Firth of Tay about a mile and a half to the West of Dundee. Its length exceeded two miles, and journalists with rapture bragged about it as the longest iron bridge in the world. Even the responsible engineers, Thomas Bouch and A. D. Stewart, did not keep their heads while their work was being done, for they published in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” a long article on their unfinished bridge—a fine example of modern vanity. Soon afterwards, on February 4th, 1877, the building work was badly injured by a gale, yet in a few months—on September 25th, in fact—the over-confident engineers had the bridge tested from end to end, and on the 31st of May, 1878, it was opened to train service.

Thomas Bouch became Sir Thomas. No one suspected that a “scientific bridge” might be a trap for railway carriages. The structure was superlatively modern: huge, ugly, vulgar, meretricious, mechanical, and charmed also with a small cost of production, which included twenty human lives and £350,000. At this price, you will understand, the longest metal bridge in the world seemed very cheap and fascinating. Newspapers were overjoyed, of course, and declared that the Tay Bridge was admirably fitted for the rushing enterprise of a commercial time. Yet every part of it was ill with the cancer of cheapness, and in 1879 the disaster came, on a Sunday evening, three days after Christmas. At about seven o’clock a terrific gale struck the eighty-four spans of the bridge, making a gap of about three thousand feet: and a few minutes later a North British mail-train drew near. Into the gap carriage after carriage dived: about eighty passengers perished, down below in the raging waters. It was a lofty bridge, in some places 92 ft. above high tide, so the falling carriages turned more than one somersault before they plunged into the Firth of Tay.

The Board of Trade held an enquiry and issued a report, affirming “that the bridge had been badly designed, badly constructed, and badly maintained.” True: but the verdict was without pity. Some excuse should have been made for the engineers’ modernity. The Tay Bridge was no worse than the popular spirit that liked screaming newspapers, and fevered excitements, and wild adventures in the quicksands of jerried workmanship. The Board of Trade published its report on the 3rd of July, 1880; and a few months later, on October 30th, Sir Thomas Bouch died of a broken heart. Perhaps the most humbling trial in his adversity was the foolish article written by his second in command, Mr. A. D. Stewart, who wanted to be quite contemporary with the flying minutes. The “Encyclopædia Britannica” deleted the article from its next edition, and printed ... some tame remarks on the disaster....

No public calamity has much effect on the modern mind. Tay Bridges and Titanics are like strong acts in a tragic play, whose influence we forget very soon. It is a thousand pities, for the next war may teach us, by frequent disasters, that machine-worship has been a mad gambler everywhere. Bridges suffered much from the priggishness of the Renaissance, but they have suffered infinitely more from the obsessions that ruined Sir Thomas Bouch. Poor Bouch! Not only did he wish to astonish the world by constructing an unparalleled bridge, wonderfully long, curved at both ends, and with a varying gradient. He desired also to prove to his employers that he could be a pattern of unusual economy. Worse still, he was so wrapped up in his calculations that he looked upon Nature with little respect. In other words, he tried to achieve “a great feat of engineering”—not often a fortunate enterprise.

From the founding of his piers he ought to have learnt that his work would be endangered partly by the repercussion of railway traffic, and partly by the varied way in which the piers would feel the scour of tidal waters during bad weather. Fourteen piers on the southern side were built on rock, then for six piers the bed was a layer of hard material resting on silt, and from the twenty-second pier northward there was sand, with occasional beds of gravel mixed with boulders. Here was a site to inspire as much awed patience and care as the Bridge Friars gave untiringly to the Pont Saint-Esprit over the Rhône. Yet in Mr. Stewart’s description there is but one emotion—a quiet self-confidence, as if the forces of Nature were as easy to manage as well-trained poodle dogs.

II

To be brief, it is evident that the bridge-building of modern times—from the Renaissance to our own day—has been nothing more than a long series of experiments from which a good many important matters have been excluded. High artistic qualities were divorced from military forethought by the earlier pontists of the Renaissance;[139] then came the delicate swagger of a fidgety dilettantism, like that which built the Palladian Bridge in Prior Park, about A.D. 1750; afterwards, by degrees, the industrial spirit began to assert itself; and in 1779 the first metal bridge was built in Europe. How different the history would have been, how much saner and finer, if bridge-builders had taken for their guide the all-sufficient principle that their work must be self-protective, not vulnerable and defenceless. From this principle the most wonderful varied work could have been evolved, generation after generation. By this time there would have been as much difference between an Elizabethan bridge and a modern stone bridge, as between Drake’s “Golden Hind” and a super-Dreadnought. But the sedulous ape has been active everywhere; and Europe to this day is proud when she builds in stone a few bridges that seem to be as good as their classic foreparents, though they break away from the classic principle of self-defence.

It is in metal bridges alone that we find a virile growth, a genuine evolution; not often artistic, and as sensitive to bombs as card castles are to a touch from your finger; but yet a great evolution because it represents modern times. If we could summon to earth the spirits of the greatest bridge-builders—Caius Julius Lacer, Apollodorus of Damascus, Isembert, Bénézet, Ammanati, and several others—they would learn nothing much from our stonework, whereas a metal bridge here and there could not fail to strike awe into these spiritual beholders. Even Lacer would be awed by the colossal newness of the Forth Bridge, whose technical inspiration might have come from Vulcan, the god of furnaces, after his annual festival on the 23rd of August. And cannot you imagine what Bénézet and Isembert would say to each other, in swift, excited French, when they gazed up and up at the airy film of road suspended over the wide Menai Straits? This would be enough to convince them that a few recent bridge-builders had forsaken ancient forms in order to give expression to generative ideas.

PONT DE TOURS—A FAMOUS BRIDGE OF THE XVIII CENTURY. IT IS IN KEEPING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WATTEAU

The concept of metal bridges may have come to Europe from China. In the seventeenth century Kircher saw and described a Chinese bridge which seems to have been a genuine suspension bridge of metal, a true forerunner of the Pont de la Caille, over the Pass of Usses, and of the immense Pont de Beaucaire, which in four spans unites Beaucaire to Tarascon, covering a distance of more than 438 metres.[140] Who can explain why backward China has hit upon many fertile ideas before the more enterprising nations? Why has she not learnt to rule the world? Perhaps her body has been too numerous for her brain. On my table lies the photograph of a bridge which may be similar to the one admired by Athanase Kircher. It is an iron swing bridge in Western China, near Auhsien. There are three piers, two of stone, and the other a makeshift of two timber piles joined together at top by a log upon which the footway rests. The carpentry of the footway is primitive: across the long bearing beams, which are not at all thick or heavy, a great many slim laths lie unevenly; and up the middle of the bridge, from end to end, is a narrow path made with long and flat planks which rest upon the transverse timbering. As for the iron suspension, it is a chain of thick and short rods which are linked firmly together. These rods, thus looped at each end and interlocked, run in two lines from abutment to abutment, making a sort of parapet at each side of the bridge. Bamboo rods suspend the footway to the iron chains, which pass over the abutments to be fastened securely on the ground.

There are four abutments, but my photograph shows only one; and it omits also the main thing of all—the means by which the metal chains are anchored. Still, the abutment is entertaining. It is a stone pillar about five feet high, perhaps a little more or less; it seems to be old, and from two holes pierced through it we learn that several experiments were made before the right leverage was obtained. The first hole was too low down, so another was drilled about 12 inches above it, and through this second hole the chain was passed, then tugged down to its anchorage. Even then the suspension was not effective, the hole or “saddle” being still not high enough above the footway, and the builders knew not what to do. Not only was there insufficient space for a third hole, but very few makers of suspension bridges have been reasonable enough to pass their metal chains over the summits of stone pillars and towers. The Chinese workmen at Auhsien were not more foolish than many European engineers have been, for their perforated pillars are not a bit worse than the perforated towers through which suspension chains pass at Clifton and at Budapest, not to mention many other familiar examples. So determined were the Chinese to overcome their difficulties without using the summit of their pillar, that they cut away the stone until they came to the second hole or saddle, and then they thrust a lump of iron under the taut chain. Next, to increase the tension still more, they put up a smaller pillar perhaps a yard from the first one, forcing it under the iron rods, which at this point strain downward to their anchorage. Curiously enough, the lesser pillar—a sort of understudy—is used as an architect would employ it: along the top a groove is hollowed, and the chain rests in the groove and then dips down at a sharp angle. Perhaps, then, the smaller pillar is fairly new, while the larger one is old.

The Rev. O. M. Jackson[141] knows this bridge very well; he lived for five years at Auhsien, and on one occasion the whole bridge was washed away by a spate. For months the iron chains lay here and there on the river-bed; and as floods are frequent, and the bridge is not a high one, very little of the workmanship has had a chance of growing hoar. The pillars have the best chance; and I suppose the iron chains are worth saving from the river whenever the bridge is reconstructed.

I have lingered over Auhsien Suspension Bridge not because of its craftsmanship, but because it marks a primitive phase in the evolution of metal bridges. Perhaps the example seen by Kircher was less rude; and perhaps the principle of its construction may have been precisely like that in the bamboo swing bridges of Western China. In these there are four huge cables of twisted bamboo[142]: two of them carry the footway, while the upper ones serve a double purpose: a strong netting on each side braces them to the lower cables, giving another support to the footway, and forming a sort of hammock a good deal taller than an average man. It is within this deep hammock that everybody walks across a bamboo swing bridge, which in a high wind is as enjoyable as a rowing-boat. At each abutment there is a gabled entrance gate, where the four cables are screwed up.[143] Displace the bamboo cables for iron chains, and we get at once, perhaps, an idea of the bridge that Kircher regarded as “merveilleux.”

As Kircher’s book was published in 1670, an iron bridge ought to have been built in Europe before the middle of the eighteenth century. An attempt to build one was made in 1755 at Lyons, but it failed. An arch was put together in a builder’s yard and then the project was abandoned as too costly! But the idea was handed on somehow to an English ironmaster, Abraham Darby, of Coalbrookdale, who in 1779 won a great success by bridging the Severn with a very useful arch of cast-iron, having a rise of 50 feet, and a span of 100 ft. 6 ins. The cost of it is not known, but the weight of metal employed was 378½ tons. The design is bold, and the arch handsome. Every pontist should get a photograph of Coalbrookdale Bridge. Already it is out of date, and its value as history will not save it from destruction.

A few years later, in 1796, Rowland Burdon followed the example set by Abraham Darby, but not as a mere copyist, his Wearmouth Bridge being an arch of open cast-iron panels, which act as voussoirs. The span is 236 feet, with a rise of 34 feet; the springings are 95 feet above the river-bed; at first the footway was rather narrow, but in 1858 it was widened by Robert Stephenson. Rowland Burdon used 260 tons of iron, and his work cost only £27,000.

Soon afterwards, in a great cast-iron arch thrown over the Spey, Telford made new experiments, and, as Professor Fleeming Jenkin has said, his bridge at Craigellachie marked “a great advance in the conception of what was the safest form in which to apply cast-iron to an arch.” But more than this was expected from an engineer of Telford’s reputation, and nothing more came from him, unfortunately. In fact, Telford divorced his work from the good sense of good design, which Darby and Burdon had endeavoured to respect. At each abutment he put up a silly tower pierced with arrow-slits and armed with battlements, advertising a farce of warlike make-believe which scores of foolish engineers would copy and adapt, while leaving their bridges entirely unfortified.

A bridge here and there is supposed to be all right. Take, for instance, the Forth Bridge, with his 51,000 tons of steel, and his amazing cost, about £3,000,000; he is looked upon as a “safe” bridge, and safe he is if we forget what bombs and shells can do in a few seconds. At each end of this bridge the railway is carried by trivial columns forming the approach viaducts, and these a naval gun would blow to smithereens. A bomb falling upon them from an airship might put the whole bridge out of action. Further, the columns are comically out of scale with those gigantic pyramids of steel bars which counterbalance the centre girders, and yet seem to play at leapfrog in two bounds of 1710 ft. each, and in two lesser jumps of 680 ft. each. Yes, the Forth Bridge looks formidably alive and active; he is to modern engineering what the Ichthyosaurus became to our knowledge of prehistoric animals: a semi-marine colossus, fit to be kept for ever as a tremendous danger happily extinct.

Several years ago, in the “Builder,” I drew attention to the defenceless character of this huge viaduct over a strategic waterway, and now I return to this topic at the beginning of a war that may well be the most terrible in all history. To-day is the 3rd of August, 1914; and the world knows that Germany has occupied Luxemburg, a neutral State, has poured her troops into Belgium, the naval key of Great Britain, and has violated the French frontier without declaring war. Here is the swift “morality” of lightning. In the strategy of war, non-moral Powers may gain over us a horrible advantage. England talks so much about peace and honour that felon Germany is able to plan at her ease great military movements of surprise as fateful as victories on stricken fields. Before this little book is published “the black bullets of Destiny” will have been cast in several countries; and not a battle will be won, nor a skirmish fought, without either help or hindrance from those soldiers unprepared that we call viaducts and bridges. Already many have been blown up in Belgium and in Servia; and by night and day, throughout Europe, men are trying to guard every bridge of vital importance to the concentration of troops. Here in England this protection is not always as alert and thorough as it ought to be. I am writing in Hampshire, near by the main line from Aldershot; within a walk of three minutes there is a high railway bridge over a road, and a few hours ago it was unguarded from the road. Yesterday evening, after dark, a German spy could have destroyed it, for I passed under its vault and found no one keeping watch and ward.[144] Instead, I encountered that supine national folly which has withheld our young men from national service, because of the rich liberty which we are supposed to get somehow from cooing claptrap, and Norman Angells, and the future pacification of mankind.

Whatever this fateful war may bring to us and to others, the defenceless bridge will have to be reconsidered; and for this reason its evolution attracts me even now, despite the darkling uncertainty that encompasses every hour of the day. The Forth Bridge, all shatterable bulk and no beauty and grace, does full justice to our industrialism, but yet he belongs, not to the public spirit of Great Britain, but to the spirit of the age everywhere; for in other lands he has a great many rivals not a whit less huge and vulnerable. As an example, we will take the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge, really a fine work of his kind, dating from 1873. He crosses the Mississippi, which at St. Louis flows in a single channel 534 yards wide and 8 feet deep at extreme low water. The greatest range between high and low water is 41 feet. There are three ribbed arches of cast steel, the middle one with a span of 520 feet, while the others are 18 feet narrower. If it was worth while for the sake of public convenience to erect this great highway above a wide and dangerous river, it was also worth while for the sake of public convenience that the width of the arches should be determined by the probable dangers to which the bridge would be exposed in commercial strikes and in other wars. Human gunpowder is not a rare thing in the United States of America. The black race there has a population that increases rapidly, and some day it may breed a great soldier, a dark Napoleon, who will find it no difficult task to organise a widespread society of bridge-wreckers. No truisms are more common than unexpected events. Let us then ask whether it would be possible swiftly to repair a metal arch having a span of 520 feet. If not, why build a huge and costly structure with steel-ribbed arches which are much too wide? What if one of them was destroyed at a time when the double railway track over the river, and the wide roadway above for other traffic, were necessary to bring reinforcements to a stricken army?

ON THE TARN AT MILLAU IN SOUTHERN FRANCE. THIS DRAWING, A COMPANION PICTURE TO GIRTIN’S “BRIDGNORTH,” REPRESENTS THE BROKEN END OF AN OLD BRIDGE WITH A MILL BUILT ON IT; BEHIND IS AN ARCH OF THE NEW BRIDGE

These questions were too unmercantile to be considered by the chief engineer, Captain James B. Eads, a very scientific person, who was entirely of a piece with our European pontists. Not a scrap of attention did he pay to military matters. Every account of Captain Eads and his bridge bombards us with technical details. We are expected to gape with admiration because £60 per ton of 2000 lbs. was the price paid for 2500 tons of cast-steel. Wrought-iron in a ton of 2000 lbs. cost £40, and 500 tons at this price were used. Rolled-iron in a ton of 2000 lbs. cost £28, and 1000 tons at this price were employed, together with 200 tons of cast-iron at £16 per ton, the ton in this case being 2240 lbs. Here indeed is a golden target for bombs and for modern artillery!

Every bridge in the United States of America is a target of this sort in one form or another. There are bonfire timber bridges, for example, exceedingly deft and excessively high; sometimes their piers are nothing more than large wooden frames piled one on top of another, up and up and up, till at last they are tall enough to be known as great sky-ticklers. One example is 234 feet high. It is the great Portage Bridge spanning the Genesee River, in the State of New York, on a railroad between New York and Buffalo. It looks like a miracle of carpentry, this wonderful bridge of frames; its length is 240 metres, and the piers—sixteen romantic scaffoldings—form immense triangles with flattened summits upon which a double gallery rests as a firm support for the railway. Each scaffolding rises from a pile of masonry nine metres higher than water-level, so that floods do not break their force against the timber frames. Good heavens above, how this bridge would burn! But it has a quite modern fascination: its cost of production was cheap!—cheap in comparison with the estimated price of a stone bridge with the same length and aviated height. This wooden structure cost about £36,000, for the pride of trade likes to pay as little as possible for the largest amount of very perishable insecurity.

Then, of course, there are sky-tickling metal bridges, and these spindle-shanked devotees of peace are popular also in Canada. All this work is nothing but industrial engineering, like the mighty bridges at New York, though these do try to look somewhat architectural. One specimen, indeed, a vast structure called the New Manhattan Bridge, has marvellously long suspension cables which do not go through a tower or gateway; they actually pass over their supports in a logical manner. What a blessing! On the other hand, Brooklyn Bridge at New York has the same mistake as our suspension bridge at Clifton ([p. 346]); and the pierced towers, each with two lancet-shaped openings, are affected and trivial. Brooklyn Bridge has a total length of nearly 1141 yards, and between the two towers there is a span of 1595 feet. The roadway is upheld by four galvanised steel cables not less than sixteen inches in diameter. Think of that! Try to imagine a span 1595 feet wide! Suppose an airship crippled it with some large bombs, how in the world could repairs be made?

Briefly, then, modern bridges everywhere are anti-social. When war is afoot, they imperil the best-made plans of strategists; and even in strikes they have to be guarded by soldiers, as if they were convents where dethroned queens lived unhappily with suffragette princesses. Though we have lived for many years on the brink of war, every highway in Europe as in America is at the mercy of bridge-wreckers. Is it not dumbfounding that no respect has been paid anywhere to the social guardianship that bridges and roads ought to perform? Why has this all-important matter been forgotten? It has been made memorable a great many times in history, ever since Horatius Cocles and his two companions held the Pons Sublicius against the whole Etruscan Army under Porsena,—a lesson never forgotten by Roman citizens.

When Lord Surrey, before the battle of Flodden Field, outwitted the Scotch by throwing his army across the Till by the beautiful old Twizel Bridge; or when Charles the Second, routed at Worcester, fled by Old Pershore Bridge into the Bredon Hills, England received one of many warnings that a secure passage over rivers might be to her at any moment as valuable as an army corps. Why has she failed to take this lesson to heart? No railway is protected by two or three branch lines over an important river, so that two or three bridges—not near together, but separated by a mile or two—would have to be destroyed before the river would be closed to the passage of troops and of food supplies. Understudy lines and bridges would be invaluable to defensive strategy.

More than a century has gone over since Perronet warned France that bridges across great rivers ought to be of a kind which would facilitate makeshift repairs after mishaps in war. He spoke earnestly, but in vain; for the conception of trade as war had not yet been forced upon the world by modernised industrialism, with its civil strikes and its international competitions. If Perronet had been able to add his foresight to the great traditions of the Ponts et Chaussées, his countrymen, probably, would have been loyal to his excellent advice, because the French have a Roman logic and they love their roads and bridges. But in France, as in other countries, a craze for engineering feats took possession of the public mind, excluding many other considerations. I know not how many perishable bridges exist at this moment in France, but I can give the figures for 1873. In that year there were one thousand nine hundred and eighty-two. Their total length was 106 kilometres, and their total cost was 286,507,761 francs. Here are some of the more expensive examples:—

Compare these figures with those of some British bridges:—

We see, then, that the bridges of civilization, when viewed merely as financial investments, are valuable enough to be made self-defensive.[145] Yet it happens that I am the only writer who has tried to draw public attention to the ease with which any bridge in England could be crippled. And the trouble is that engineers hold the field, because the man of business finds in their work a hard routine that looks practical and mercantile. What we need is the influence of architects. For capable architects have the genius of artists, and when artists give their minds to practical affairs they show a range of common sense that men of trade rarely equal. It is in their nature to look at a question from all sides till they see it amply and as a whole, while men of trade isolate two or three things from many, and accept them tenaciously as the only things that merit attention.

But in our social life and strife there are certain newcomers that will compel the world to reconsider its wrong attitude to bridge-building. I refer to airships and to aviation, with their threatened wars from overhead. A good many bridges over strategical waterways can be displaced by tunnels, but many others must be armoured with cone-shaped roofs. Art and science have done wonderful things for the modern battleship, and now—now they must invent and perfect a new battle-bridge, fit to protect arterial highways from “progress.”

It is the morning of the 4th of August, and I have just read the latest war news. The whole life of Europe is a note of interrogation, infinitely sinister and tragic. What is destined to happen? Which nations are doomed to perish? What navy will go down into the deep? Which airmen will make the most successful attacks on those bridges that govern the distribution of food supplies? Will the equity of Europe triumph, or will German felony succeed?

Three months have passed, and I add a few lines to my page proofs. Many events have illustrated and confirmed the main arguments of this monograph. Everywhere defenceless bridges have been the cause of much anxiety, and dozens have been destroyed because they could not be turned into rearguard defences. Wellington said that his sappers in five minutes could blow up a modern bridge. In the present campaign sappers have done this work under fire, mining strategic highways being a simple job. How ludicrously tragic is the contrast between the building of a modern bridge and its easy demolition! A little common sense would have flanked each entrance with a Brialmont fort, and would have given to the bridge itself an armoured efficiency. Every bridge between the French frontiers and Paris ought to have been as effective as a super-Dreadnought. So the use of battleship steel in bridge-building is one thing that engineers must consider with the utmost care after Germany has been overthrown. If they do no more than follow their foolish old routine, then their work will be a crime against patriotism.

In other respects the Great War has been a wondrous varied surprise, bringing weakness to the strong and power to the weak. Germany has been humbled both by little Belgium and by the little British army; her prestige has dwindled so much that fighting mechanisms are regarded no longer as superior to fighting men. In true discipline there is an art of humane pride, and Germany has crushed it out of her automatic battalions, preferring an organised cruelty as insensitive as a railway accident, and a system of lying that rivals Munchausen’s. Even her learned professors fill current history with explosive lies, just as her seamen before the declaration of hostilities dropped mines in the North Sea from trawlers that flew the British flag. If victory could be won by vile misdeeds, Germany would be unconquerable. Never before has a powerful nation been so corrupted by forty years of unscrupulous vainglory. Her ambition is to Europe what cancer is to a human body—a ravaging disease which may break out again after the best surgeons have finished their work. Already she has tried to postpone the operation by making overtures to stop the necessary bloodshed. Germany wants to give in before the British Empire can put a million troops in the field, because she knows not only that Allies often quarrel during the negotiations that rearrange maps, but that such quarrels occur most often when a great country has a little army in absolute antagonism with widespread interests of a vital sort. And this, moreover, is not the only peril. In the British Isles many thousands of peace-fanatics bide their time; some of them are active already as pro-Germans; many others declare that they have no wish to humble the German people, who now approve every act of a Hunnish despotism elaborated by their Government; and when our British sentimentalists, aided by several Radical newspapers, begin a campaign of shrieking claptrap, a just resentment will be felt by France and Russia. So the warfare of diplomacy may be more dangerous to the Allies than the warfare of stricken fields. We must wait and see. But the present position confirms another argument in this monograph: namely, that those who decline to see the perpetual strife that reigns in all human affairs, and who babble in a routine of fixed ideas about the illusion called peace, are quite as perilous to a country as were the creeds of bloodshed which many German writers advertised, taking liberties with the ingenuous pacifism coddled by British Governments.

Let us delete from every dictionary the lying word peace; and let us believe firmly in the simple truth that strife everywhere is the historian of life. The strife in all its phases ought to be well trained and chivalric, of course; and it needs vast improvements in the campaigns of business warfare. Every slum, for example, is very much worse than the longest battle with firearms, because it endures for ages; and what chivalry in the wars of trade is as noble as that which grants to young men the privilege of defending the old age of their country from danger and dishonour?

FOOTNOTES:

[136] It is worth noting, as an example of British apathy in home defence, that the railway from Aldershot toward Southampton is for many miles a single line only, and that it passes over a good many gimcrack bridges and between some narrow and steep embankments, as in the neighbourhood of Medstead. The line is an open trap; it could be shut up in a dozen places by a few intelligent spies, if spying did not generate an excessive caution as futile as cowardice.

[137] This bridge is 250 metres long, and the five arches have equal spans of 40 metres. Perronet died in 1791, at the age of eighty-three, and we study his best work at Mantes, Orléans, Nogent-sur-Seine, Pont-Saint-Maxence, Château-Thierry, and Neuilly-sur-Seine.

[138] His words run as follows: “I think that it may be prudent, when designing bridges for rivers of great width, to introduce some strong piers, which in case of need may serve as abutments, putting them at distances of three or four arches apart. Moreover, this arrangement will enable us to construct long bridges in different parts successively, and each part may be considered as a complete bridge, having its own independent abutments; but strict care should be taken not to contract the beds of rivers by using too many thick piers.” One of Perronet’s immediate predecessors, the engineer Gabriel, built a bridge of this sort, over the Loire at Blois. He spaced his plan into eleven fine arches, and erected two abutment piers, placing them at four bays from each bankside, and leaving three bays between them. By this means his bridge was divided into three independent parts.

[139] Examples: See the index under the headings [“Trezzo,”] [“Ticino,”] [“Pavia,”] and [“Ammanati’s Trinità at Florence.”]

[140] See Degrand’s “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” Tom. 2, p. 24, note 3. See also Dalquié’s translation of Kircher’s book, published at Amsterdam in 1670. There is a reference to iron in a bridge on p. 288, but Degrand’s information must be taken from the following passage: “L’on voit un pont dans la Province de Junnan, qu’on a basti sur un torrent, lequel roule ses flots impetueux dans le panchant d’une profonde vallée. C’est un commun sentiment qu’il fût basti en l’an 65 après la naissance de Jesus Christ par l’ordre de l’Empereur Mingus, sorti de la famille Hame; il n’est pas fait de brique ny de pierre; mais on a attaché de grosses chaisnes [chaînes] à ces deux montagnes qui vont d’une extremité à l’autre, au-dessus desquelles on a mis des ais pour faciliter le passage des voyageurs. Ce pont, qui a vingt chaisnes, a 20 perches de long qui font 140 pieds: l’on dit que quand beaucoup de personnes passent dessus, ou qu’il y a quelque grand fardeau, il branle si fort qu’il fait peur à ceux qui y sont” (p. 289). This description is vivid, and M. Degrand regards the chains as chains of iron. He says: “Kircher mentionne l’existence ... d’un pont composé de chaînes de fer supportant, en travers d’une vallée profonde, un tablier en charpente d’une grande longueur, c’est-à-dire un véritable pont suspendu, ayant précédé sans doute de plusieurs siècles les ponts du même genre construits à l’époque moderne en Europe et aux États-Unis.”

[141] See Index for other references to Mr. Jackson.

[142] Marco Polo describes very well how the bamboo in China is twisted or plaited into cordage. He says: “They have canes of the length of fifteen paces, which they split, in their whole length, into very thin pieces, and these, by twisting them together, they form into ropes three hundred paces long. So skilfully are they manufactured, that they are equal in strength to cordage made of hemp.”

[143] I take this description from two photographs belonging to the Church Missionary Society.

[144] On the 4th of August this important bridge was guarded by Territorials.

[145] Not all bridges should be military, of course, since those near a frontier may have to be destroyed at a moment’s notice in order to check the advance of a surprise attack.

RAIN