And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great roads to-day.
That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which darts upon Rouen from Paris.
Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether in the last twelve miles before the capital of Normandy, it still stands on the modern map a great modern road with every aspect of purpose and of intention in its going.
From Amiens again they radiate out, these roads, some, like the way to Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the sea, to the Portus Itius, to Boulogne, a mere lane often wholly lost and never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the French feudal cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crécy, and just beyond Crécy it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads wherever the hunter finds them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track, all the way past Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussée, that is Novelle on the paved road), on past Estrée (where from the height you overlook the battlefield of Crécy), and that ruler so lying on your map points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away—and in all those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it. But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is nothing like it in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up the whole of the mind. True, you will get no sauce of danger, but, on the other hand, you will hunt for weeks and weeks, and you will come back year after year and go on with your hunting, and sometimes you actually find—which is more than can be said for hunting some animals in the Weald.
How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went, and the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come during that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the end of the Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared. It is a sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which serves Crécy, it gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those ridges upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England, and then it is gone. It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty odd miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of the legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be that the little lane leading into Estrée shows where it crossed the valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very proper to the huntsman.
Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think, when he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in two to cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to Noyon, the old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the way, and it stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until suddenly, without explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like the life of a man. It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at the edge of the wood which is there. And seek as you will, you will never find it again.
From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object was St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven: there is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and out, and the open plough of the rolling land. But continue by your compass so and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent reason for its abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from the capital of the Nervii, three days’ march and more, and pointing all the time straight at Vermand.
And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and there, as at Bavai, a great capital has decayed. Here and there (but more rarely), a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans, but the plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the roads as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies that you see marching to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a morning the line which was taken by the Legions.
[The Reward of Letters]
It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world possess some sort of literature, as Iceland her Sagas, England her daily papers, France her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia her railway guides, one nation and one alone, the Empire of Monomotopa, is utterly innocent of this embellishment or frill.