If you cross by Calais you come, some three miles from French land, over that good holding ground where the Armada lay at anchor on a summer evening waiting to take aboard the unconquered soldiery which was designed for the assault of England; but Howard and the flock of little English boats came up after, just thwart of Griz-nez, which you see tall and huge to your right: they lay there at anchor out of range against the stormy sunset, and when night came drove in their fire-ships against the Spanish Fleet and broke its formation, and next day the tempest drove them up that flat coast to your left, and so on to destruction in the open sea.
Then see how the French road is full also. Here, just beyond Étaples, is the place where the two ambassadors passed in '93, neither knowing the other: the one returning, driven out of London, the other posting thither at full speed to avert war. They missed, and so war came. A little further on to your left is a patch of wood; to your right, beyond the flats, is a broad estuary of which you may see the lighthouse towers. That wood is the wood of Crécy: through it there marched the English host on their way to victory in the rising ground beyond. The river mouth is that whence William started with his hundreds of ships on the way to Hastings: he lay gathered there with the wind in his teeth for days, until the equinox sent him a south-wester and he bowled across to Pevensey and landed there: every stretch of this road is alive with stories and things done.
The way down into Italy by Bourg is a way of armies also, though not a way of English armies, and it is a way of great influences too. Thus, if you would see the Gothic North and the Southern Renaissance first meeting, like salt water and fresh at the turn of a river-tide, get out at Bourg and drive a mile to Brou and see there the tombs of the House of Savoy. There is no sight like it in Europe, yet how few know it out of all who whirl down that line—often by night—on the way to the Alps or to Italy?
There are other roads: each tempts one to a list of wonders. The road northeastward from Paris, every step of which is the line of the last Napoleonic struggle. The road eastward into Germany by Metz, every step of which is the history of the Revolution, or of invasion, or of success in the field. A little station which your eyes will hardly catch as the express goes by is neighbour to the camp that Attila made before he was defeated in those plains of Champagne; another little station, the station of a hidden hamlet, is called Valmy; half-an-hour on, beyond Les Islettes, you see quite close by the forest path that Drouet took when he intercepted the flight of the King and so destroyed the French Monarchy.
All these roads are known roads, but there is one which the railway has abandoned and which is therefore half derelict; many motors rediscover it, for it has half the story of Europe strung along it—I mean the road from Paris by Tours and Poictiers to Perigueux, to Toulouse, over the High Pyrenees and on to Saragossa. No one line serves it. Across the mountains for a day and more of travel there is no line at all, but this is the road up which Islam came a thousand years ago to end us. The host got past Poictiers. Charles met them from Tours and they were destroyed. You may see the place to-day, and this is the road by which all the Frankish and Gothic invasions moved on Spain, and this is the road that Charlemagne must have taken when he first marched across the hills against the Valley of Ebro. I know of no road more holy with past wars, none more wonderful where it meets the mountains, none better made for all sorts of going—and none more deserted than it is upon the high places between France and Spain—but of this road I will write later to prove how much there may be in travel.
ON THE TRAVELLER
Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter, about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the pleasure of history: for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were, a great memory of things like a human memory, but stretched over a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.
It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road, to look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only pleasant meadows, but also the place in which the fate of English mediæval monarchy was decided; or, as you stand by that ferry which is not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful things in England) and look back and see Tewkesbury tower framed between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind—a great mass of similar stone with solid Norman walls, standing to the right of the building.