A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

If Androuet du Cerceau had been asked to foretell the development of bridge-building, his answer could not have been less militant than the Pont Henri IV; he would have said that bridges, like battleships and fortified places, would continue to oppose the science of military attack, because their safety would be affected by all improvements in the methods and materials employed by armies. His view of life and art, as we see it in his work, has been the view of all thoughtful craftsmen. He believed that the genius of invention, age after age, set up her home in the ablest minds, and passed through an ordered growth, till at last she attained her culmination. As long as improvements could be made in the action of aggressive war, counter improvements could be made in the reaction of defence, for the art of inventing each new weapon would suggest a means by which its utility in war might be thwarted, and perhaps nullified.

But I do not think that Androuet du Cerceau realised to the full what competent bridges ought to have been to his generation. He was too mediæval in his attitude to strife, and this defect was perhaps inevitable. You see, the Pont Henri IV was erected between the years 1564 and 1609; and during these forty-five years the spirit of the times was dead against an efficient strategy both in defence and in attack. Soldiers of every rank were passing through a transition, unaided by much enthusiasm. Indeed, new methods were hated rather than liked, because they seemed to be less chivalric, or what the French called less “heroic,” than were the ancient methods, though many of these had grown obsolescent. Alexandre Dumas wrote several delightful books on this period in the evolution of fighting, when gunpowder was a war-god that no brave man was at all eager to worship before an altar of unwieldy firearms. Soldiers liked a battle to be a duel at very close quarters, so they were not amused when they fired through a fog of suffocating smoke, and coughed and sneezed in a chorus, while tears dripped from their eyes. Here and there, of course, while Androuet du Cerceau was engaged upon his bastille bridge, “villainous saltpetre” had some ardent followers. Turn to the military writers of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, for instance, and read the long dispute that went on between the old school and the new. Some experts had a firm belief in the old archery statutes, while others put their trust in ponderous firearms that went off after much coaxing and never carried straight for a hundred yards.

PONT HENRI IV OVER THE VIENNE AT CHÂTELLERAULT IN FRANCE BUILT BY CHARLES ANDROUET DU CERCEAU, 1504-1609. TILL 1624 THE TWO GREAT TOWERS WERE UNITED BY A PAVILION FORMING A GATEWAY. ONE OF THE LATEST OF THE BASTILLE BRIDGES

In those days there were two handguns, both rather old, and their improvement baffled the ingenuity of gunsmiths. One was the petronel or arquebuse, which had come into vogue in 1480; the other was the musket, which in 1521, or thereabouts, was brought into use by the Emperor Charles V, who believed in it because he had never tried to hold the “kicking demon” through a battle. For a long time petronels were discharged by a lighted match, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century a wheel-lock was invented, to be superseded at last—about the year 1692—by the flint-lock. Progress was exceedingly halt-footed; but one day a pious clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Forsythe, happened to be startled by a very profane idea; it seemed to him that gunpowder in a musket might be ignited by a percussion cap. Good Forsythe! Being very practical as well as pious (these two qualities go together like body and soul, as a rule), he patented his mother-idea, A.D. 1807; and in less than thirty years the principle of the percussion cap was accepted by the War Office, though public opinion in England cooed over Peace, believing that henceforth mankind would be satisfied with continual wars between Capital and Labour. There is no need to sketch the equally slow improvements in the manufacture of cannon. Enough to say that among Wellington’s siege artillery in Spain there were Spanish guns dating from the Armada period.

Briefly, then, from Androuet du Cerceau’s time onward to the year 1857, when the old musket Brown Bess was put aside for ever, the dilatory progress of attack in war gave bridge-builders every opportunity of keeping pace with it and of making their defence as thorough as possible. Yet nothing was done. Not even a single effort was made to evolve the old war-bridge into a modernised protection; and it is very far from easy to explain this quite sudden departure from a very old routine of defensive forethought. Several reasons have been given, of course, but they have no backbone and no brain. It was argued, for example, that bridges were as advantageous to an attack as to a defence, so the whole strategy of war would protect them quite enough. Even in our own time this very queer argument has been advocated, as if to prove that minds as well as eyes often suffer from astigmatism. What successful army is not hindered and harassed by guarding many hundreds of defenceless bridges? And what modern army in retreat has ever failed to leave behind it an extra rearguard of broken bridges?

Let me give but one example. Sir John Moore could never have made his terrible march from Sahagun to Coruña, but for his good fortune in the matter of rivers and bridges. When Napoleon himself got within striking reach, near Benavente, on the torrent Esla, Moore’s rearguard blew up three spans of the old bridge of Castro Gonzalo; and when the cavalry of the Imperial Guard found a deep crossing and forded the river into a wide poplared plain, Paget and the 10th Hussars galloped through their broken ranks, destroying half of them, and capturing their general Lefebvre Desnouettes. Much later, when the narrow and snowbound Pass of Piedrafita was littered with dead British troops, all killed by hunger and cold and exhaustion, Moore was befriended by the great Roman bridge of Constantino, and by the noble viaduct of Corcul between Nogales and Becerrea. Paget was left behind with the rearguard, and in brilliant actions at the bridges he checked the pursuit, while Moore marched on toward Lugo. If a French spy had blown up the bridge of Constantino and the viaduct, after hearing of Moore’s approach, the British would have been brought to a standstill, and from a desperate position there would have been little chance of escape. So the viaduct and the Roman bridge stood between victory and defeat; they saved the British and baffled the French. In fact, Moore reached Lugo without much further harrying.

Not only is there a bridge of Constantino in all campaigns, but we may be sure that as no country will ever wish to be invaded the airmen scouts of the future will try to destroy all bridges beyond their own frontiers, so as to cripple the enemy’s prearranged movements. Defeat in the near future may be nothing more than a paralysis of communications, caused by bridge-wrecking airships and aeroplanes. Try to imagine what we should suffer, if we lost in a single night eight or ten of the bridges that help to unite London to Edinburgh and Glasgow. To lose the Forth Bridge alone would be a bad defeat; and yet, as I have said, there are people still who argue that bridges need no protection because their utility in war is invaluable to both sides.[136]

This hollow argument was very active during the ferment of the Renaissance, which became to architecture what a political party spirit is to an army. In fact, it was the Renaissance that produced the disintegrating party strife of rival “styles,” and soon the followers of classic forms and ceremonies were more powerful than their opponents, who believed in the native genius of Gothic art. The aim of our classic men was to renew under our Northern sky an alien inspiration born and bred in the ardent climates of Greece and of Rome. In other words, they wished to repeat, by plodding and self-conscious effort, what Rome had done in architecture with the patient and slow methods of her colonisation. In this way they appealed to everybody who tried to seem erudite, and their endeavours entered that world of educated fashion where a false quantity was a greater sin than intemperance. Just as the chatty, delightful Montaigne wanted to hide his genius among profuse gleanings from ancient writers, so most architects believed that they could do no good in life unless they tried to be Greek or Roman. Progress was no longer an organic growth, it was a copied fashion, an inconvenient mode. Not even a church could be built without help from pagan temples. Not an equestrian statue could be modelled unless a Christian of sorts, either king or warrior, put on the costume of a Cæsar, and then straddled ill at ease across the back of a reasonable horse, which alone merited the long life of bronze. Amid this ferment of comic priggishness and pedantry young men served their apprenticeship, and became artists and craftsmen. Inevitably, bridge-builders were affected, and as prigs most of them did their work as public servants.