There is a province of Europe where a dead plain stretches out upon every side. It is not very extended if you judge by the map alone, it is perhaps but twenty-five or thirty miles from its centre to either of its boundary ranges; but to the eye it seems infinite, for it lies under that grey weather of the North in which the imagination exaggerates distance and so easily conceives imaginary flatnesses extending everywhere beyond the mist of the horizon.

In the midst of this plain there rises most abruptly a little market town. It stands upon a conical hill some 300 feet in height, and the impression it gives of being a rock or an island is enhanced by the height of its buildings, which, as is the case with nearly all mediæval work, are designed for a general effect, and are, whether consciously or unconsciously, as well planned and grouped as though one artist had sketched the whole and had left an inviolable design to posterity.

In this little town I had business some years ago to stop for the night, and when the next morning I found that there were two hours between my [Pg 237]breakfast and my train I walked out on to the crest of the hill to see the view and to think about the past. It was autumn; the many artificially aligned trees which bordered the winding, deserted avenues all round the edge of the height were losing their leaves; the air was singularly clear, and the effect of the small but isolated height upon which one stood was very strong. I came to the north-eastern corner of the huge ramparts which still surround the little place, and there I found a most interesting man. He was upon the border between what are called now-a-days middle age and old age; that is, he was an old man, and if he lived would soon be a very old man. He was erect and spare; he was short, and he had all the bearing of a man who has been perpetually trained, and, indeed, I found out when I got to know him better that he had seen service in Africa and in Russia and in Mexico, three very distant places. He had never, however, risen beyond the rank of colonel; he was a gunner, and exceedingly poor, and he was finishing his life alone in this little town. They gave him meals at the hotel for a sum agreed upon between them. Where he lodged he did not choose to tell me, but I fancy in some very cheap and ruinous little room under one of the big Flemish roofs of the place. His only pleasure was to take these walks about the town, to read his newspaper before it was twenty-four hours old, and to remember the trade in which he had been engaged.

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We sat together on the very edge of the rampart, and I asked him, since it was his business to know so much about these things, whether the place would ever in his opinion enter once again into the scheme of European war.

He told me that this was absolutely certain; he said there was no field so small nor no village so forgotten, but in its cycle was swept by one or other of those armies which the peoples of Europe send out one against the other, pursuing various ends. This little town in which we sat had never seen an enemy for over two hundred years; yet there beneath us was the enormous evidence of its past. The trench was like a street fifty feet or sixty feet deep, as the house fronts of a street are, as wide at least as the narrow streets of any of these old towns, and on the further side the enormous heap of earth, and beyond it the level descent of the glacis. Here was a town not larger than some of our smaller English cathedral towns, Ely for instance, yet having round it such a mighty effort and proof of military determination as would to-day seem worthy of a great city. These fortifications ran all round the place, the two only gates in and out of it (through which ran the great road which linked the stronghold with the capital) were flanked by such works as the great modern forts occasionally show, and upon every point of its circumference one perceived the fixed will of a crushing Government responsible for all the destinies of a nation that this place should be inviolable.

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My companion said to me: "Many men choose many things as their examples of the way in which nothing human can remain, and to most men the best example is the change of taste in art or letters. They point out how great buildings put up with infinite care by men who loved them with all their souls seem tawdry to an immediate posterity; and they wonder why verse which was supreme in their childhood is ridiculed in their old age. But to me the most formidable proof of our futility is to be found in works such as these. They succeed each other all over Europe. Long before our written record began you have the Cyclopæan Wars; what you can see in Tuscany and further east in the Mediterranean. You have the Roman entrenchments, and the mediæval castles, and the new system of Vauban which the Itali............