[5] Some authors give various measurements. Legrand says that the biggest arch had a span of thirty-four metres, and that its greatest height, when intact, was thirty-two metres. I cannot do better than refer you to Choisy’s “Art de bâtir chez les Romains,” Paris, 1874. Several ancient writers—Claudian, Procopius, and Martial—guide Sir William Smith in his remarks on Narni Bridge, but he makes a mistake when he speaks of “three” arches.
[6] See “Northern Spain,” by Edgar Wigram, an excellent book. The gable-shaped bridges are mostly of mediæval date. Some fine examples: at Martorell (partly Roman), at Puente la Reina, and across the Gallego river between Jaca and Huesca. To-day these are seldom used because of their steep pitch and of their narrowness. The great one at Orense, over the Miño, is still in daily use.
[7] Gable bridges are uncommon in Great Britain, but a fine example crosses the river Taff not far from Cardiff. It is called the Pont-y-Prydd. Between its abutments the great arch measures 140 feet, and the footway is so very steep that laths of wood used to be fastened across it to keep horses from falling. Before industrialism murdered a beautiful countryside the Pont-y-Prydd was a rainbow of stone that shone all the year round. We owe this bridge to a self-educated country mason, William Edwards by name, who in 1750 brought his work to completion, after suffering defeat in two previous efforts. My photograph of the Pont-y-Prydd is disgraced by a very hideous commercial bridge that progress has put quite close to the Welsh masterpiece, but, happily, there are many old engravings and pictures that do full justice to William Edwards. Richard Wilson painted the Pont-y-Prydd—an excellent recommendation to a fine piece of handicraft.
[8] Mr. Wigram, in his finely illustrated book on Northern Spain, reminds us that the Puente Mayor at Orense played a various part in the Peninsula War. It was the pivot of the French operations when Soult led his troops from Coruña to renew the subjugation of Portugal. At first all went well, but “within two months his army was reeling back from Oporto, without hospital, baggage, or artillery, in a worse plight even than Moore’s. He had wrestled his first fall with the great antagonist who was destined to beat him from the Douro to Toulouse.”
[9] See [Appendix I].
[10] See [Appendix II] for a description of this Roman bridge.
[11] This was written several months before the outbreak of the Great War, which England had invited by allowing her peace-fanatics to bill and coo in her foreign politics. Instead of reading the arrogant books on blood-lust that nourished the well-advertised aims of Germany, England played the fool with epicene triflers of all sorts and conditions, and turned her back on Lord Roberts, her truthful statesman. She babbled about peace until she received from the Prussian junkerdom proposals so abominable that they brought her to the fighting point of honour; and then she cried out for a million new soldiers. Yet British statesmen, even then, paid many compliments to their bad old habit of ingenuous pacifism. No political dove wanted the world to believe that there had been anything of the eagle in his attitude to German war-culture. As if this truism could be a consolation to heroic little Belgium, the Jeanne d’Arc of nations, whose safety England had guaranteed, and whose experiences in the hell of Teutonic savagery had left her scorched, mutilated, yet unconquered. Can anyone explain why the word “peace” has been hypnotic to Anglo-Celtic minds? Every phase of human enterprise must be a phase of war, because it claims a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed. Poverty alone is such a terrible phase of permanent war that pacifists ought to devote all their energy to its gradual betterment. Even the accidents of civilization—street and railway accidents, colliery explosions, sea tragedies, and so forth—equal in a century the casualties on stricken fields. If only our sentimentalists would try to think! Then they would learn that the occasional strife between armies never destroys in a century as many lives as the multiform continuous strife called peace. And we may be certain that all the human war of the future will not belong to “peace” alone. The birth of many a new era will be aided by the fierce midwifery of military and naval warfare. To-day is the 26th of September, 1914, and England in two months has nearly outgrown the routine claptrap of her effete idealism. To-day she is eager to bear any amount of self-sacrifice; two months ago her peace-mania was a crime against the Empire and against her treaty obligations to Belgium. She had no faith in National Service till Germany had passed from arrogant warnings to barbaric aggressions. Agadir was not enough to put common sense into her dreamful solicitude about international “peace.” “Peace” in her home affairs she never tried to get; she wanted peace to conquer the nations, not to cure industrial conflicts and the Irish Question. What a comic tragedy! And let us remember that our peace-fanatics, though silent to-day, are not dead. Their influence will become active again after the overthrow of Germany. New mischief will flow from their sentimentalism. To lose the flower of British youth, while keeping our peace-fanatics: here indeed is a sinister fact.
[12] See “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.” J. J. Jusserand. The chapter on roads and bridges.
[13] There has been much controversy over the position of the Pons Sublicius. (See [p. 140.])
[14] See the most valuable book on Domestic Medicine by Lister’s little-known forerunner, Dr. William Buchan, of Edinburgh. The eighteenth edition was published in 1803, and its pictures of social life are most helpful to a pontist.