Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs. But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.
Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders, but I am as certain as any one can be of such a memory, and I believe it is the earliest thing of which I have any clear memory left.
Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a life-long companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard of the fall of the Bastille from an eye-witness; and that would be as though some very old person to-day were to tell one that he had spoken to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very old person to-day were to remember having met in childhood a person who had talked to one who had seen John Milton.
The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!) been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were many others.
Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided; they remain divided to-day upon the issue after more than thirty years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure the conviction of a man against whom there was strong _prima facie_ evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser, but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers, one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were above the law.
I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court, and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.
Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.
There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society, enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for, the other against.
I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained, or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend, intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.
The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that we owe the four years of war, 1914-18: for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi.
Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical oppositions.
It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation which as a fact has been carefully avoided.
For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity ‘drawn up’ upon a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use, but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach. Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Cæsar landed at Deal his small but respectable force in this fashion, not through a harbour, but on a beach; and civilian sailing and piracy all used the same method. The ship of antiquity could ride, and also be moored in harbour, but was also beached. It came up to a shelving shore _and was pulled up on to the land_. It was pulled up out of reach of the waves; and it will be remembered how Cæsar got into trouble during his first expedition (and second!) because he had not allowed for an exceptionally high tide accompanied by a storm. He got his ships on shore all right, but he had not pulled them up far enough.
How was it done? You cannot say it was done by capstans, because that could only apply to beaches already prepared. If you say it was done by hauling upon ropes over rollers the answer is not sufficient. How was the boat kept upright while this was going on, and what numbers would not be required to beach thus even a single ship of three or four hundred tons, and, having so beached it, by what means could one rapidly float it again?
The ancients had some method which they took for granted, for they knew the difficulty of it, and which landsmen had seen practised a thousand times, and yet of which no description has come down to us in our fragmentary records of the past. The poets tell us that the ships stand upon the shore, and they leave it at that. They seem to tell us also that the boats were helped up stern foremost, but how on earth the thing could be done with a very large armament rapidly, and upon a beach unprepared, baffles us.
There is another problem I have never seen solved. How did Barbarians organise and commissariat the enormous bodies which came across the Alps for the plunder of Italy, and were as a rule destroyed by the Italian armies in antiquity. How did they get such a force as that of Radagasius across the Alps, or that of Brennus? I choose the Alps in particular because it is an extreme case, but it is almost as difficult to understand how they moved across flat country. In the case of the Alps, you had narrow tracks for much more than a day’s march, often for a week’s march; tracks from which it was impossible to deploy to right and left. There must, therefore, have been a very long column in file, a column of many, many miles. It is easy to calculate, in the case of Radagasius, that he could not possibly have extended over less than thirty miles, and probably his column covered a good deal more. Our academic writers seem to think that a body of this sort moves as a matter of course, like an individual, or like a small body which can easily organise its movements: a dozen people out for a walk. But here you have numbers in respect of which any one with an elementary knowledge of military history, knows that high organisation alone could prevent disaster.