BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Great Sight
All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams
was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age; but there
hung from beam to beam, fantastically, a wire caught by nails, and here
and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a symbol of
the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local by-law to
forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of obeying it.
Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion
and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which
is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely
ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the
plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the steep
bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all at
random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were nearing
the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the high flat we
should have a greater horizon and a better chance of catching any
indications of men or arms.
When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.
It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see up
to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups of
trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a corps d'armée--and not to see or hear a soul. The
only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very
slowly up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot
dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As
we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men
indeed, and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the
chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of
polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall
betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at
all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate
business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether
you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.
It was nine o'clock before a clatter of horse-hoofs came up the road
behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the
first riders of the Dragoons or Cuirassiers. In that case the advance
was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard
how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a
small escort and two officers with the umpires' badges, so there was
nothing doing; but when, half a mile ahead of us on the road, they
turned off to the left over plough, we knew that that was the way we
must follow too. Before we came to the turning-place, before we left the
road to take the fields on the left, there came from far off and on our
right the sound of a gun.
It was my companion who heard it first. We strained to hear it again;
twice we thought we had caught it, and then again twice we doubted. It
is not so easily recognizable a sound as you might think in those great
plains cut by islands of high trees and steading walls. The little "75"
gun lying low makes a different sound altogether at a distance from the
old piece of "90." At any rate there was here no doubt that there were
guns to the right and in front of us, and the umpire had gone to the
left. We were getting towards the thick, and we had only to go straight
on to find out where the front was.
Just as we had so decided and were still pursuing the high road, there
came, not half a mile away and again to our right, in a valley below us,
that curious sound which is like nothing at all unless it be dumping of
flints out of a cart: rifle fire. It cracked and tore in stretches. Then
there were little gaps of silence like the gaps in signalling, and then
it cracked and tore in stretches again; and then, fitfully, one
individual shot and then another would be heard; and, much further off,
with little sounds like snaps, the replies began from the hillside
beyond the stream. So far so good. Here was contact in the valley below
us, and the guns, some way behind and far off northwards, had opened. So
we got the hang of it instantly--the front was a sort of a crescent
lying roughly north and south, and roughly parallel to the great road,
and the real or feigned mass of the advance was on the extreme left of
that front. We were in it now, and that anxious and wearing business in
all hunting, finding, was over; but we had been on foot six mortal hours
before coming across our luck, and more than half the soldiers' day was
over. These men had been afoot since three, and certain units on the
left had already marched over twenty miles.
After that coming in touch with our business, not only did everything
become plain, but the numbers we met, and what I have called "the thick
of things," fed us with interest. We passed half the 38th, going down
the road singing, to extend the line, and in a large village we came to
the other half, slouching about in the traditional fashion of the
Service; they had been waiting for an hour. With them, and lined up all
along the village street, was one battery, with the drivers dismounted,
and all that body were at ease. There were men sitting on the doorsteps
of the houses and men trotting to the canteen-wagon or to the village
shops to buy food; and there were men reading papers which a pedlar had
brought round. Mud and dust had splashed them all; upon some there was a
look of great fatigue; they were of all shapes and sizes, and altogether
it was the sort of sight you would not see in any other service in the
world. It was the sort of sight which so disgusted the Emperor Joseph
when he made his little tour to spy out the land before the
Revolutionary Wars. It was the sort of sight which made Massenbach
before Grandpré marvel whether the French forces were soldiers at all,
and the sort of sight which made Valmy inexplicable to the King of
Prussia and his staff. It was the sort of sight which eighteen months
later still convinced Mack in Tournai that the Duke of York's plan was a
plan "of annihilation." It is a trap for judgment is the French service.
So they lounged about and bought bread, and shifted their packs, and so
the drivers stood by their horses, and so they all waited and slouched;
until there came, not a man with a bugle nor anything with the slightest
savour of drama but a little fellow running along thumping in his loose
leather leggings, who went up to a Major of Artillery and saluted, and
immediately afterwards the Major put his hand up, and then down a
village street, from a point which we could not see came a whistle, and
the whole of that mass of men began to swarm. The grey-blue coats of the
line swung round the corner of the village street; they had yet a few
miles before them. Anything more rapid or less in step it would be
difficult to conceive. The guns were off at a right angle down the main
road, making a prodigious clatter, and at the same time appeared two
parties, one of which it was easy to understand, the other not. They
were both parties of sappers. The one party had a great roll of wire on
a drum, and as quick as you could think they were unreeling it, and as
they unreeled it fastening it to eaves, overhanging branches, and to
corners of walls, stretching it out forward. It was the field-telephone.
The other party came along carrying great beams upon their shoulders,
but what they were to do with these beams we did not know.
We followed the tail of the line down into the valley, and all that
morning long and past the food time at midday, and so till the sun
declined in the afternoon, we went with the 38th in its gradual success
from crest to crest. And still the 38th slouched by companies, and mile
after mile with checks and halts, and it never seemed to get either less
or more tired. The men had had twelve hours of it when they came at
last, and we after them, on to the critical position. They had carried
(together with all the line to left and to the right of them) a string
of villages which crowned the crest of a further plateau, and over this
further plateau they were advancing against the main body of the
resistance--the other army corps which was set up against ours, to
simulate an enemy.
A railway line ran here across the rolling hedgeless fields, and just at
the point where my companion and I struck it there was a dip in the land
and a high embankment which hid the plain beyond; but from that plain
beyond one heard the separate fire of the advancing line in its
scattered order. We climbed the embankment, and from its ridge we saw
over two miles or more of stubble, the little creeping bunches of the
attack. What was resisting, or where it lay, one could only guess. Some
hundreds of yards before us to the east, with the sloping sun full on
it, a line of thicket, one scattered wood and then another, an
imperceptible lifting of the earth here and there marked the opposing
firing line. Two pompoms could be spotted exactly, for the flashes were
clear through the underwood. And still the tide of the advance continued
to flow, and the little groups came up and fed it, one after another and
another, in the centre where we were, and far away to the north and
right away to the south the countryside was alive with it. The action
was beginning to take on something of that final movement and decision
which makes the climax of manoeuvres look so great a game. But in a
little while that general creeping forward was checked: there were
orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each
position held. My companion said to me:
"Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among Picquart's
men, and get well behind their line, and see whether there is a rally or
whether before the end of this day they begin to fall back again."
So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts
and were behind their forward lines. And standing there, upon a little
eminence near a wood, we turned and looked over what we had come,
westward towards the sun which was now not far from its setting. Then it
was that we saw the last of the Great Sight.
The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain
strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the
opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of
the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low
steep cliffs, dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first
from the cover of one and then from another the advance perpetually,
piercing and deploying. As we so watched there buzzed high above us,
like a great hornet, a biplane, circling well within our lines, beyond
attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it.
In a few minutes a great Bleriot monoplane like a hawk followed, yet
further inwards. The two great birds shot round in an arc, parallel to
the firing line, and well behind it, and in a few minutes, that seemed
seconds, they were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And
perpetually, as the sun declined, Picquart's men were falling back north
and south of us and before us, and the advance continued. Group by group
we saw it piercing this hedge, that woodland, now occupying a nearer and
a nearer roll of land. It was the greatest thing imaginable: this
enormous sweep of men, the dead silence of the air, and the
comparatively slight contrast of the ceaseless pattering rifle fire and
the slight intermittent accompaniment of the advancing batteries; until
the sun set and all this human business slackened. Then for the first
time one heard bugles, which were a command to cease the game.
I would not have missed that day nor lose the memories of it for
anything in the world.
The decline of a State is not equivalent to a mortal sickness therein.
States are organisms subject to diseases and to decay as are the
organisms of men's bodies; but they are not subject to a rhythmic rise
and fall as is the body of a man. A State in its decline is never a
State doomed or a State dying. States perish slowly or by violence, but
never without remedy and rarely without violence.
The decline of a State differs with the texture of it. A democratic
State will decline from a lowering of its potential, that is of its
ever-ready energy to act in a crisis, to correct and to control its
servants in common times, to watch them narrowly and suspect them at all
times. A despotic State will decline when the despot is not in point of
fact the true depository of despotic power, but some other acting in his
name, of whom the people know little and cannot judge; or when the
despot, though fully in view and recognized, lacks will; or when (which
is rare) he is so inhuman as to miss the general sense of his subjects.
An oligarchic State, or aristocracy as it is called, will decline
principally through two agencies which are, first, illusion, and
secondly, lack of civic aptitude. For an oligarchic State tends very
readily to illusion, being conducted by men who live at leisure, satisfy
their passions, are immune from the laws, and prefer to shield
themselves from reality. Their capacity or appetite for illusion will
rapidly pervade those below them, for in an aristocracy the rulers are
subjected to a sort of worship from the rest of the community, and thus
it comes about that aristocracies in their decline accept fantastic
histories of their own past, conceive victory possible without armies,
wealth to be an indication of ability, and national security to be a
natural gift rather than a product of the will. Such communities further
fail from the lack of civic aptitude, as was said above, which means
that they deliberately elect to leave the mass of citizens incompetent
and irresponsible for generations, so that, when any more strain is upon
them, they look at once for some men other than themselves to relieve
them, and are incapable of corporate action upon their own account.
The decline of a State differs also according to whether it be a great
State or a small one, for in the first indifference, in the latter
faction, are a peril, and in the first ignorance, in the latter private
spite.
Then again, the decline of a State will differ according to whether its
strength is rooted originally in commerce, in arms, or in production;
and if in production, then whether in the production of the artisan or
in that of the peasant. If arms be the basis of the State, then that the
army should become professional and apart is a symptom of decline and a
cause of it; if commerce, the substitution of hazards and imaginaries
for the transport of real goods and the search after real demand; if
production, the discontent or apathy of the producer; as with peasants
an ill system in the taxation of the land or in the things necessary for
its tillage, such as a misgovernment of its irrigation in a dry country;
the permission of private exactions and tolls in a fertile one; the
toleration of thieves and forestallers, and so forth. Artisans, upon the
other hand, may well flourish, though the State be corrupt in such
matters, but they must be secured in a high wage and be given a vast
liberty of protest, for if they sink to be slaves in fact, they will
from the nature of their toil grow both weak and foolish. Yet is not the
State endangered by the artisan's throwing off a refuse of ill-paid and
starving men who are either too many for the work or unskilful at it?
Such an excretion would poison a peasantry, remaining in their body as
it were, but artisans are purged thereby. This refuse it is for the
State to decide upon. It may in an artisan State be used for soldiery
(since such States commonly maintain but small armies and are commonly
indifferent to military glory), or it may be set to useful labour, or
again, destroyed; but this last use is repugnant to humanity, and so in
the long run hurtful to the State.
In the decline of a State, of whatever nature that State be, two vices
will immediately appear and grow: these are Avarice and Fear; and men
will more readily accept the imputation of Avarice than of Fear, for
Avarice is the less despicable of the two--yet in fact Fear will be by
far the strongest passion of the time.
Avarice will show itself not indeed in a mere greed of gain (for this is
common to all societies whether flourishing or failing), but rather in a
sort of taking for granted and permeation of the mere love of money, so
that history will be explained by it, wars judged by their booty or
begun in order to enrich a few, love between men and women wholly
subordinated to it, especially among the rich: wealth made a test for
responsibility and great salaries invented and paid to those who serve
the State. This vice will also be apparent in the easy acquaintance of
all who are possessed of wealth and their segregation from the less
fortunate, for avarice cleaves society flatways, keeping the scum of it
quite clear of the middle, the middle of it quite clear of the dregs,
and so forth. It is a further mark of avarice in its last stages that
the rich are surrounded with lies in which they themselves believe.
Thus, in the last phase, there are no parasites but only friends, no
gifts but only loans, which are more esteemed favours than gifts once
were. No one vicious but only tedious, and no one a poltroon but only
slack.
Of Fear in the decline of a State it may be said that it is so much the
master passion of such decline as to eat up all others. Coming by travel
from a healthy State to one diseased, Fear is the first point you take.
Men dare not print or say what they feel of the judges, the public
governors, the action of the police, the controllers of fortunes and of
news. This Fear will have about it something comic, providing infinite
joy to the foreigner, and modifying with laughter the lament of the
patriot. A miserable hack that never had a will of his own, but ran to
do what he was told for twenty years at the bidding of his masters,
being raised to the Bench will be praised for an impartial virtue more
than human. A drunken fellow, the son of a drunkard, having stolen
control over some half-dozen sheets, must be named under the breath or
not at all. A powerful minister may be accused with sturdy courage of
something which he did not do and no one would mind his doing, but under
the influence of Fear, to tell the least little truth about him will put
a whole assembly into a sort of blankness.
This vice has for its most laughable effect the raising of a whole host
of phantoms, and when a State is so far gone that civic Fear is quite
normal to the citizens, then you will find them blenching with terror at
a piece of print, a whispered accusation. Bankruptcy, though they be
possessed of nothing, and even the ill-will of women. Moneylenders under
this influence have the greatest power, next after them, blackmailers of
all kinds, and next after these eccentrics who may blurt or break out.
Those who have least power in the decline of a State, are priests,
soldiers, the mothers of many children, the lovers of one woman, and
saints.
There lies in the North-East of France, close against the Belgian
frontier and within cannon shot of the famous battlefield of Malplaquet,
a little town called Bavai--I have written of it elsewhere.
Coming into this little town you seem to be entering no more than a
decent, unimportant market borough, a larger village meant for country
folk, perhaps without a history and certainly without fame.
As you come to look about you one thing after another enlivens your
curiosity and suggests something at once enormous and remote in the
destinies of the place.
In the first place, seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a
star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast, bare
fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the
provinces, and making to great capitals far off--to Cologne, to Paris,
to Treves, and to the ports of the sea.
These roads are deserted in great part. Some of them are metalled in
certain sections, and again in other sections are no more than lanes,
and again no more than footpaths, as you proceed along their miles of
way; but their exact design awfully impresses the mind. You know, as you
follow such strict alignment, that you are fulfilling the majestic
purpose of Imperial Rome. It was the Romans that made these things.
Then, intrigued and excited by such remains of greatness, you read what
you can of the place.... And you find nothing but a dust of legend. You
find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and worshipping
strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of the earth;
desired his capital to be a hub and navel for the world. He put them
under the protection of the seven planets and of the deities of those
stars. Three he paved with black marble and four with white marble, and
where they met upon the market place he put up a golden terminal. There
the legend ends.
It is only legend--a true product of the Dark Ages, when all that Rome
had done rose like a huge dream in the mind of Europe and took on
gorgeous and fantastic colouring. You learn (for the rest) very
little--that ornaments and money have been found dating from two
thousand years, that once great walls surrounded the place. It must have
had noble buildings and solemn courts. In strict history all you will
discover is that it was the capital of that tribe, the Nervii, against
whom Caesar fought, and whose territory was early conquered for the
Empire. You will find nothing more. There is no living tradition, there
is no voice; the little town is dumb.
The place is a figure, and a striking one, of greatness long dead, and a
man visiting its small domestic interests to-day, and noting its
comfort, its humility, and its sleep, is reminded of many things
attaching to human fame. It would seem as though the ambitions of men,
and that exalted appetite for glory which has produced the chief things
of this world, suffer the effect of time somewhat as the body of an
animal slain will suffer that.
One part of the organism and then another decays and mixes back with
nature. The effect of will has vanished. The thing is a prey to all that
environment which, once alive, it combated, conquered, and transformed
to its own use. One portion after another is lost, until at last only
the most resisting stands--the skeleton and hard framework, the least
expressive, the least personal part of the whole. This also decays and
perishes. Then there remains no more but a score of hardened fragments
that linger in their place, and what has passed away is fortunate if
even the slightest or most fantastic legend of itself survives.
The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit; we lose the
nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their affections.
Bit by bit all that they intended to be eternal slips back into the
common thing around. A blurred image, growing fainter and fainter,
lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some public
raising material things--a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or weapon of
enduring metal--is all that remains.
If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up
in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring.
It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to
cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed
upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various
forms of fame which are young men's goals, and to which the eager
creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each in
turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired reward;
and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries, another
that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of courage will
remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left their feast.
As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one
kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does
give them a sort of fixed tenure--if not for ever, yet for generations
upon generations--in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of
the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who
were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which they
handled or they knew--all fabrics, all instruments, all habitations. It
is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man reads the "Song
of Roland" and can still look on that same unchanged Cleft of
Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day westward from
the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed blessed in
this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that they were,
and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:----
Mais un tel accident n'arrive point a l'âme,
Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut.
* * * * *
Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu
Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poésie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu.
But the matter is still undecided.
On the field of Malplaquet, that battlefield, I met a man.
He was pointed out to me as a man who drove travellers to Bavai. His
name was Mr. The Duke, and he was very poor.
If he comes across these lines (which is exceedingly unlikely) I offer
him my apologies. Anyhow, I can write about him freely, for he is not
rich, and, what is more, the laws of his country permit the telling of
the truth about our fellow-men, even when they are rich.
Mr. The Duke was of some years, and his colour was that of cedar wood. I
met him in his farmyard, and I said to him:
"Is it you, sir, that drive travellers to Bavai?"
"No," said he.
Accustomed by many years of travel to this type of response, I
continued:
"How much do you charge?"
"Two francs fifty," said he.
"I will give you three francs," I said, and when I had said this he
shook his head and replied:
"You fall at an evil moment; I was about to milk the cows." Having said
this he went to harness the horse.
When the horse was harnessed to his little cart (it was an extremely
small horse, full of little bones and white in colour, with one eye
stronger than the other) he gave it to his little daughter to hold, and
himself sat down to table, proposing a meal.
"It is but humble fare," he said, "for we are poor."
This sounded familiar to me; I had both read and heard it before. The
meal was of bread and butter, pasty and beer, for Malplaquet is a
country of beer and not of wine.
As he sat at table the old man pointed out to me that contraband across
the Belgian frontier, which is close by, was no longer profitable.
"The Fraud," he said, "is no longer a living for anyone."
Upon that frontier contraband is called "The Fraud"; it holds an
honourable place as a career.
"The Fraud," he continued, "has gone long ago; it has burst. It is no
longer to be pursued. There is not even any duty upon apples.... But
there is a duty upon pears. Had I a son I would not put him into The
Fraud.... Sometimes there is just a chance here and there.... One can
pick up an occasion. But take it all in all (and here he wagged his head
solemnly) there is nothing in it any more."
I said that I had no experience of contraband professionally, but that I
knew a very honest man who lived by it in the country of Andorra, and
that according to my morals a man had a perfect right to run the risk
and take his chance, for there was no contract between him and the power
he was trying to get round. This announcement pleased the old gentleman,
but it did not grip his mind. He was of your practical sort. He was
almost a Pragmatist. Abstractions wearied him. He put no faith in the
reality of ideas. I think he was a Nominalist like Abelard: and whatever
excuse you may make for him, Abelard was a Nominalist right enough, for
it was the intellectual thing to be at the time, though St. Bernard
utterly confuted him in arguments of enormous length and incalculable
boredom.
The old man, then, I say, would have nothing to do with first
principles, and he reasserted his position that, in the concrete, in the
existent world, The Fraud no longer paid.
This said for the sixth or seventh time, he drank some brandy to put
heart into him and climbed up into his little cart, I by his side. He
hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an
extraordinary shrill noise with his mouth, like a siren, and the horse
began to slop and sludge very dolefully towards Bavai.
"This horse," said Mr. The Duke, "is a wonderfully good horse. He goes
like the wind. He is of Arab extraction, and comes from Africa."
With these words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick, and
once more emitted his piercing cry. The horse went neither faster nor
slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole
performance.
"He is from Africa," said Mr. The Duke again, meditatively. "Do you know
Africa?"
Africa with the French populace means Algiers. I answered that I knew
it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine.
At this he looked very pleased, and said:
"I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times."
To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it, so
I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said:
"The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to
conduct beasts; that was my trade. When they caught me I was to have
been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman!"
Having said this the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it
with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, then he began talking again
rather more excitedly.
"It is a terrible thing and an unhappy thing none the less," he went on,
"that a man should be taken out to be shot and should be saved by the
tears of a woman." Then he added, "Of what use are wars? How foolish it
is that men should kill each other! If there were a war I would not
fight. Would you?"
I said I thought I would; but whether I should like to or not would
depend upon the war.
He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and stupid.
Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian centuries he
was in no way muddle-headed upon the matter. He saw very well that his
doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country, and wrong to love
it, and that patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal was worth
physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at the end of
his life.
The white horse meanwhile slouched; Bavai grew somewhat nearer as we sat
in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over in
his mind. He veered off on to political economy.
"When the rich man at the Manufactory here, the place where they sell
phosphates for the land, when he stands beer to all the workmen and to
the countryside, I always say, 'Fools! All this will be put on to the
cost of the phosphates; they will cost you more!'"
Mr. The Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill's proposition upon the cost
of production nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which Mill's
propositions were based. In his opinion rent was a factor in the cost of
production, for he told me that butter had gone up because the price of
land was rising near the towns. In what he next said I found out that he
was not a Collectivist, for he said a man should own enough to live
upon, but he said that this was impossible if rich people were allowed
to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were and how
people voted. He said:
"The politicians trick the people. They are a heap of worthlessness."
I asked him if he voted, and he said "yes." He said there was only one
way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant.
Had time served I should have asked him further questions--upon the
nature of the soul, its ultimate fate, the origin of man and his
destiny, whether mortal or immortal; the proper constitution of the
State, the choice of the legislator, the prince, and the magistrate; the
function of art, whether it is subsidiary or primary in human life; the
family; marriage. Upon the State he had already informed me, and also
upon the institution of property, and upon his view of armies. Upon all
those other things he would equally have given me a clear reply, for he
was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than most people can
say.
But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank
together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest look
in his face. With more leisure and born to greater opportunities he
would have been talked about, this Man of Malplaquet. He had come to his
odd conclusions as the funny people do in Scandinavia and in Russia, and
among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and Berlin; but he
was a jollier man than they are, for he could drive a horse and lie
about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted he used a phrase
that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before in my life. He
said:
"We shall never see each other again!"
Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a farmer
in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in the days
when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people, many, many
years ago. He also said: "We shall never meet again!"
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Great Sight