As the ninth battery passed us we were given the order to mount, and knew that our place came next. The long-drawn Ha-a-lte! and the lifted swords down the road contained for a while the batteries that were to follow, and we filed out of our side road into the long gap they had left us. Then, taking up the trot, ourselves, we heard the order passing down infinitely till it was lost in the length of the road; the trumpets galloped past us and formed at the head of the column; a much more triumphant noise of brass than we had yet heard heralded us with a kind of insolence, and the whole train with its two miles and more of noisy power gloried into the old town of Bar-le-Duc, to the great joy of its young men and women at the windows, to the annoyance of the householders, to the stupefaction of the old, and doubtless to the ultimate advantage of the Republic.
When we had formed park in the grey market-square, ridden our horses off to water at the river and to their quarters, cleaned kit and harness, and at last were free—that is, when it was already evening—Matthieu, a friend of mine who had come by another road with his battery, met me strolling on the bridge. Matthieu was of my kind, he had such a lineage as I had and such an education. We were glad to meet. He told me of his last halting-place—Pagny—hidden on the upper river. It is the place where the houses of Luxembourg were buried, and some also of the great men who fell when Henry V of England was fighting in the North, and when on this flank the Eastern dukes were waging the Burgundian wars. It was not the first time that the tumult of men in arms had made echoes along the valley. Matthieu and I went off together to dine. He lent me a pin of his, a pin with a worked head, to pin my tunic with where it was torn, and he begged me to give it back to him. But I have it still, for I have never seen him since; nor shall I see him, nor he me, till the Great Day.
THE LOOE STREAM
Of the complexity of the sea, and of how it is manifold, and of how it mixes up with a man, and may broaden or perfect him, it would be very tempting to write; but if one once began on this, one would be immeshed and drowned in the metaphysic, which never yet did good to man nor beast. For no one can eat or drink the metaphysic, or take any sustenance out of it, and it has no movement or colour, and it does not give one joy or sorrow; one cannot paint it or hear it, and it is too thin to swim about in. Leaving, then, all these general things, though they haunt me and tempt me, at least I can deal little by little and picture by picture with that sea which is perpetually in my mind, and let those who will draw what philosophies they choose. And the first thing I would like to describe is that of a place called the Looe Stream, through which in a boat only the other day I sailed for the first time, noticing many things. When St. Wilfrid went through those bare heaths and coppices, which were called the forest of Anderida, and which lay all along under the Surrey Downs, and through which there was a long, deserted Roman road, and on this road a number of little brutish farms and settlements (for this was twelve hundred years ago), he came out into the open under the South Downs, and crossed my hills and came to the sea plain, and there he found a kind of Englishman more savage than the rest, though Heaven knows there were none of them particularly refined or gay. From these Englishmen the noble people of Sussex are descended.
Already the rest of England had been Christian a hundred years when St. Wilfrid came down into the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this sparse and ignorant tribe. They were living in the ruins of the Roman palaces; they were too stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman things they had destroyed. They had kept, perhaps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all the Roman slaves. They had, therefore, vague memories of how the Romans tilled the land.
But those memories were getting worse and worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since the ships of Aella had sailed into Shoreham (which showed him to be a man of immense determination, for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were then no piers and lights)—it was nearly two hundred years, and there was only the least little glimmering twilight left of the old day. These barbarians were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever will when they are cut off from the life and splendour of the south. They had become so cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came wandering among them they did not know how to get food. There was a famine, and as their miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists)—their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly energy which all decent Western religion gives a man, they being also by the wrath of God deprived of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, but probably they thought their horizon was the end of the world)—their religion, I say, being of this nature, they had determined, under the pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw them tying themselves together in bands (which shows that they knew at least how to make rope) and jumping off the cliffs into the sea. This practice he determined to oppose.
He went to their King—who lived in Chichester, I suppose, or possibly at Bramber—and asked him why the people were going on in this fashion, who said to him: "It is because of the famine."
St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said: "Why do they not eat fish?"