“All my long night walks seem to me now as but preparation for one which I was obliged to make at the outbreak of the war in Europe. I had crossed the Channel from England to France, on the day that war was declared by England, to get a boy of ten years out of the war zone. I got as far by rail as a town between Arras and Amiens, where I expected to take a train on a branch road toward Dieppe; but late in the afternoon I was informed that the scheduled train had been canceled and that there might not be another for twenty-four hours, if then. Automobiles were not to be had even if I had been able to pay for one. So I set out at dusk on foot toward Dieppe, which was forty miles or more distant. The experiences of that night would in themselves make one willing to practice walking for years in order to be able to walk through such a night in whose dawn all Europe waked to war. There was the quiet, serious gathering of the soldiers at the place of rendezvous; there were the all-night preparations of the peasants along the way to meet the new conditions; there was the pelting storm from which I sought shelter in the niches for statues in the walls of an abandoned château; there was the clatter of the hurrying feet of soldiers or gendarmes who properly arrested the wanderer, searched him, took him to a guard-house, and detained him until certain that he was an American citizen and a friend of France, when he was let go on his way with a ‘Bon voyage’; there was the never-to-be-forgotten dawn upon the harvest fields in which only old men, women, and children were at work; there was the gathering of the peasants with commandeered horses and carts in the beautiful park on the water-front at Dieppe; and there was much besides; but they were experiences for the most part which only one on foot could have had.”
In answer to a request for a contribution to this handbook, Dr. Finley replies generously, and to the point:
“I have never till now, so far as I can recall, tried to set down in order my reasons for walking by night. Nor am I aware of having given specific reasons even to myself. It has been sufficient that I have enjoyed this sort of vagrancy. But since it has been asked, I will try to analyze the enjoyment.
“1. The roads are generally freer for pedestrians by night. One is not so often pushed off into the ditch or into the weeds at the roadside. There is not so much of dust thrown into one’s face or of smells into one’s nostrils. More than this (a psychological and not a physical reason) one is not made conscious by night of the contempt or disdain of the automobilist, which really contributes much to the discomfort of a sensitive traveler on foot by day. I have ridden enough in an automobile to know what the general automobile attitude toward a pedestrian is.
“2. Many landscapes are more beautiful and alluring by moonlight or by starlight than by sunlight. The old Crusader’s song intimates this: ‘Fair is the sunlight; fairer still the moonlight and all the twinkling starry host.’ And nowhere in the world have I appreciated this more fully than out in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, where the Crusaders and Pilgrims walked by night as well as by day. But I have particularly agreeable memories, too, of the night landscapes in the Green Mountains.
“3. By night one is free to have for companions of the way whom one will out of any age or clime, while by day one is usually compelled, even when one walks alone, to choose only from the living and the visible. In Palestine, for example, I was free to walk with prophet, priest, and king by night, while by day the roads were filled with Anzacs and Gurkhas and Sikhs, and the like. Spirits walk by day, but it takes more effort of the imagination to find them and detach them. One of my most delightful night memories is of a journey on foot over a road from Assisi that St. Francis must have often trod.
“4. There is always the possibility of adventure by night. Nothing can be long or definitely expected, and so the unexpected is always happening. I have been ‘apprehended’—I do not like to say ‘arrested’—several times when walking alone at night. Once, in France, I was seized in the street of a village through which I was passing with no ill intent, taken to a guard-house and searched. But that was the night of the day that war was declared. Once, and this was before the war, I was held up in Rahway, toward midnight, when I was walking to Princeton. I was under suspicion simply because I was walking, and walking soberly, in the middle of the road.
“5. By day one must be conscious of the physical earth about one, even if there is no living humanity. By night, particularly if one is walking in strange places, one may take a universe view of things. Especially is this true if the stars are ahead of one and over one.
“6. Then it is worth while occasionally to see the whole circle of a twenty-four hour day, and especially to walk into a dawn and see ‘the eye-lids of the day.’ I had the rare fortune to be on the road in France when the dawn came that woke all Europe to war. And I was again on the road one dawn when the war was coming to its end out in the East.
“7. There are as many good reasons for walking by night as by day. But no better reason than that one who loves to walk by night can never fear the shadow of death.