Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  They are masters of a kind of formless music which appeals particularly to modern men, and they have also a much older popular music which is universal among them and is most pleasing. They are imperturbably patient, and this virtue in them has had great effect upon their physical science and has enabled them to accomplish prodigies of research in history—though when it comes to putting the items of their research together into rational form they are never very successful and often absurd. The stuff that is called the Higher Criticism came from them; we are already losing it and we are losing it without regret. Their reading of the past when it is not mere empty vainglory is all out of gear. They put things in the wrong order and leave out the essentials.

  Their defects they owe always to the same radical defect; they are immature. It is this which gives them the charm and also the exasperating quality of children. Thus they are not cruel but they have blind fits of rage and they get specially angry with people who are too much for them. They have no chance intellectually against the Jew, and their ‘reaction’ as the Americans call it is therefore to lash out at the Jew; and, like children, they must always be holding somebody’s hand and be guided and led about. I have heard a man who knows them well and intimately through long residence among them, and with a good acquaintance of them and their idioms, compare them to putty. Anyone who gets hold of them can mould them as he wills. That was the chance of the Prussian military caste; when they broke down it was the chance of the Jew; now it is the chance of a little clique, not very sane and wholly ignorant, who rely upon the natural tribal patriotism of the millions for the moment in their hands.

  Prussia

  §

  So far as this little booklet of random notes is concerned the present interest of the Germans is their present command of the Baltic. Prussia has inherited the shores of that sea, the conquests of Sweden. What Sweden did to make the Baltic a Swedish lake we know. The military genius of Sweden succeeded in that aim, it succeeded in reaching that goal. Then came the rise of Prussia and the gradual absorption of the southern Baltic shore by Berlin.

  There was a moment when that work in its turn was undone. Prussia and the huge coalition which she had got together when she launched war in 1914 was defeated by another less powerful but more enduring coalition, one enjoying the high advantages of the West. Prussia in 1914 when she demanded French fortresses contemptuously by ultimatum and struck out into a venture against the Russians had everything in her favour. The only properly equipped army on the other side when she began was the French. It was the only conscript army comparable in quality to her own, but the French were not only hopelessly outnumbered but also went into the war blindfold through the destruction of their Intelligence Department during and after the Dreyfus Affair. The weight of England could only tell after two years, Russia had no adequate material equipment for her vast man power and no communications corresponding to them. The chances were three to one for Berlin against the West, and nothing but their own blunderings broke down the plans of the Prussian General staff.

  I repeat the truth that it would have been possible to have restored peace and security to the Baltic by making Dantzig once more the port of the Poles, leaving Polish influence free to colonise and transform that city, giving to Poland a large seaboard, cutting off East Prussia and leaving that province to wither. That solution was advised by the experts who understood their business; it was turned down by the ignorant politicians sent from England and the United States who had for the Poles an antipathy almost as Strong as their lack of European knowledge was profound and wide.

  Since it was taken for granted that the new Poland could not live, the international banking system, of which the chief exponent was the Bank of England, put all their money on Berlin. The English politicians, but still more the English banking power, restored Prussia, and that is why Prussia is not only leading and organises all the German millions, but unhappily dominates the Baltic to-day.

  Gustavus Adolphus

  §

  When one goes back again to Sweden from the southern Baltic shore, when one returns from Poland, risen from the dead, to Sweden, Still enduring, it is over a sea which has become once more a Prussian sea. The more relief is it to find oneself back again in the peace and the equable life of Scandinavia; and when one so finds oneself among the Swedes again, the mind returns to their great soldier. When one is writing of the Struggle between him and the Poles—knowing that the Poles were the champions of Europe, Gustavus the champion of anti-Europe—there is little sympathy to waste upon him; but time having gone over all that and left him a figure of another sort with a romance and value of its own, cannot but remember him with sympathy. For the danger of Europe to-day is of another kind, infinitely worse and on a far greater scale.

  I regret that there is not a great Statue Standing out somewhere upon the promontory of the Baltic, a Statue on a heroic scale to represent Gustavus Adolphus—the soldier.

  There ought to be one to that Vasa Standing opposite to that other Vasa, his cousin Sigismund who blesses and defends the Polish country from his tall column in the market place of Warsaw. They could reply one to another, those two Statues, and I hope that some day the Swedes will put one up to their immortal captain. He did every kind of harm. He busied himself with destroying, as much as he could, the unity of Christendom. He ruined the tradition of Germany, supporting that mortal rebellion of the Germans against the Empire which left them worn out, bleeding and half dead for the better part of a hundred years. But he was so great a soldier that I cannot abandon his name.

  Men are divided into those who love soldiers and those who hate them, for whereas there are many men who will forgive in a soldier almost anything so that he be a soldier and who are moved by the story of soldiering as by a triumphal music, so there are many to whom the man serving under arms is repulsive. As the poet sang of his opponent:

  ‘He doesn’t mind the Moscow crew who stink in stolen furs

  But cannot bear the people who wear little gilded spurs.

  For though he scribbles with a will, the man is such a cad

  That soldiers always make him ill and Guardsmen drive him mad.’

  Yes, there are people who go off the deep end when they approach the very name of Alexander, of Caesar or of Napoleon, let alone the lesser captains. Why it is so I know not. For my part I could forgive a man anything when I hear or read of him that he has done well in battle and if he has spent his life with soldiers. They are very jolly in peace as well, though garrison duty is enough to break any man’s heart.

  Whenever they put up that Statue to Gustavus Adolphus on that promontory or one facing the Baltic Sea (let them make it at least 30 feet high and better 50 feet high or 100 feet high—like the Statue of the crusading pope which is stuck on the top of a great hill overlooking the Marne— and there is another of another pope, if I remember right, on the big Burgundian hill near Dijon). Well, whenever they put up that kolossal to Gustavus Adolphus may I be alive to hear of it if not to see.

  Of course it is good fortune makes the great general, not only his talents but the opportunity for using those talents. But then, luck rules all, and it is no more against the glory of a soldier that he depends on fortune than it is against the glory of a poet, for the poet also depends on luck as all men do. Gustavus selling himself to Richelieu, doing his best to kill the Faith in Germany, villain, usurper, looter, anything you like, was still the maker of the modern army. He it was who first began to understand guns. He is spiritually the ancestor of Bonaparte in this, and in that brilliant twelve months of victory at the end of which he fell (his body stripped naked on the battlefield), he crowded all that a man can crowd of glory.

  We have men to-day who have done original things with new weapons but have not got the name they deserve. One such man comes to my mind, an Englishman who was within an ace of ending the Great War himself by his own talent, inventing a new tactic with tanks. He also ought to have his Statue when Statues are handed round.<
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  Butler in Erewhon made the excellent suggestion that no Statue should be put up to anyone until he was dead so many years, and that even when the Statue had been put up it was to be destroyed if, after another period of years, men, by a vote taken, no longer approved of it. As a political scheme there is a great deal to be said for this, yet it would be bad for history and therefore for mankind. The iconoclasts have always done harm, but nothing to the harm of those who wantonly destroyed the marble coffins of antiquity, of those who ruined the great tomb of the Chaise Dieu in the central mountains and the tomb of William the Conqueror in Caen during the Huguenot wars.

  Iconoclasts

  §

  What is it in man which makes him thus a destroyer of his own creation? The French are the chief culprits, but there are plenty of examples elsewhere. And by the way, let anyone who sculpts or models or paints, while he is taking a pride in his achievement, Standing back and looking at it and saying, ‘This will remain for ever,’ let every artist in that mood tell himself that as like as not his grandchild or his great grandchild will come along with a hammer and knock it to pieces, or with a torch and burn it. When men are disgruntled, or when they are in the exactly opposite mood of exaltation, they seem moved to destroy, and what a pity! But even destruction in anger and enthusiasm is not so bad as pedantic destruction, the cold-blooded handmaid of outrageous vanity and ignorance.

  There is one kind of destruction which stands between the two and is perhaps inevitable, the destruction which comes from change in taste. When some art of the past becomes meaningless to the remote descendants of those who set up its masterpieces and when those descendants therefore pull down what their fathers did, get rid of it for rubbish and replace it by some perhaps worthy thing of their own, there is taking place a process which is unavoidable but none the less to be regretted. What would I not give for the woodwork of the choir in Notre Dame of Paris, the Misericordes and the carven Stalls, the dark oak which must have been so admirably married to the great ogives! It was carted away as rubbish and the Great King put in its place that formal seventeenth-century woodwork which you look upon to-day. Where did it go? Who bought up the fragments? Were they used as firewood, or what? At any rate they have gone, and it is a thing to shed tears over.

  There is here a duty imposed, I think, a special duty, upon all governments. Moulds should be taken of pretty well every figure subject remaining to us from the past and these should be Stored up, or even exhibited, so that men can tell how their ancestors lived and how they looked and how their minds worked.

  Two such stores have disappeared in the last few years in both of which I took great pleasure. One was in the Architectural Museum, a dingy, dark room in Great Smith Street, Westminster. The other was in the fine long gallery of the Trocadero. From this last one could copy any one of a thousand mediæval figures. I hope they have been preserved. Anyhow, it is certainly the duty of the state to keep a living record of all such things, for some of them are lost or destroyed or mutilated with every year that passes.

  Gothenburg

  §

  And so good-bye to Gustavus and to the Baltic world.

  §

  I was to leave Scandinavia by Gothenburg. The port Stands at the mouth of that river which drains the great upland lake of Wenner. Its last reaches broaden as the salt water is approached, though it Still remains a not very wide inland Stream, running through flat country between the hills and the shore.

  On my approach to the port the summer evening was fading, excellently placid, in a dust of gold, and the sun to the west, within two hours of its late northern setting, Stood benignant, shedding a quiet influence over all. The whole thing made a worthy exit for this, my return to the Baltic.

  §

  As one goes down the last reaches of that river, now in repose after its rapid fall from the highlands, one passes on the right the last of those very few great fortifications which Scandinavia can boast. It is a large ruined castle on a low but abrupt hill near the right bank of the Stream where a subsidiary valley comes in, and it had been built, I suppose, to guard the two issues: that up the river of Gothenburg itself (the Gota) and that running north and east up country. It does not seem to have been planned by the ruling power, but rather by some local great owner of land and serfs, and administration who took toll there, but indeed of its history I know nothing. It will remain in my mind always from the way it Stands a sort of sentinel, so exceptionally strong in that country where walls and castles are so rare. Then, below it, the Stream slips down to meet the sea.

  As I approached Gothenburg and could see the Steamer masts far off at the quays, I could not but remember that motto which I first read in Maurice Baring’s book on Mary Queen of Scots: her own motto: ‘My end is my beginning.’

  For it was by Gothenburg that I had entered Scandinavia all those many years ago in my youth, and at Elsinore that I first said good-bye to Scandinavia on my way back home over the North Sea. Now at the end of forty-three years it was the other way about. I had Started at Elsinore, I was ending at Gothenburg, and I would see Gothenburg, I suppose, for the last time—but one never knows. Very vividly does that fresh arrival, that first experience of a foreign country, Stand in my mind with a lifetime in between.

  Men were talking in England during those days of a system of licensing called the ‘Gothenburg ’ system; and as my companion and I were young and everything was for us a jest, there was no better jest to occupy us than the Gothenburg system. I do not know what the system was, save that it was one of the innumerable tricks for interfering with men’s getting something to drink. In those days such tricks seemed to me mere foolery. They are always oppressive, always unjust and the morals at the back of them are offensive, for they take it for granted that man has not the self-control to use the gifts of nature and of art; but I know now how menacing the danger is, and no doubt they were half right. No doubt they are half right to-day in trying to meet that danger by the artificial restrictions which are worse in Sweden than in Denmark over the water.

  Anyhow, the Gothenburg system as we found it was a great surprise, for we young men on leaving the Steamer and having about us the air of this foreign town, went into the first hotel of any consequence where we thought we could refresh ourselves from the strain of the sea journey. There did we make acquaintance for the first time of that admirable institution, the Smärgas, which all over the Baltic feeds men and almost takes the place of meals: that immensely exaggerated, that enormous hors d’æuvres business where a man may eat more than his fill of little fishes and dried and smoked flesh and onions and radishes and meat paste and I don’t know what-and-all.

  But though the Smärgas delighted us indeed and was a discovery worth coming all those miles over the waves (and suffering the beastliness of the boat in those parts of it devoted to the poor, with whom we travelled), it was not the greatest surprise. The greatest surprise was a lot of little taps set in the wall of the dining room, Standing above the sideboard on which the admirable Smärgas Stood. These little taps were labelled by all sorts of names, names of Strong waters, Schnapps and Brandy and Curaçoa and the whole regiment of them. People went up, each with his little glass, turned on the tap and filled the little glass, drank a bit and went back to their Smärgas, and after five or six minutes of the Smärgas filled the little glass again at another tap, sampling the liquors in turn.

  ‘This,’ said I to my companion of those days, ‘is apparently the Gothenburg system’; and when we got back to Oxford we never took a liqueur at the end of a meal without calling our action by that sacred name, the Gothenburg system. Thus was the memory of the town imprinted upon my mind. I am told that to-day these ancient habits have disappeared. At any rate, I saw nothing of it in Gothenburg, for when I got there I went Straight from the quay into the Steamer that was to take me to England.

  In that first coming upon Scandinavia I had travelled through the night up country and made a vocabulary for myself in a new and unknown fa
shion. I did it with the aid of a local schoolmaster who was also attached in some way to the railway Station where I had to Stop in the middle of the night. He knew Latin. I would write down in Latin the name of something, such as pants for bread, vinum for wine, and he would write the Swedish name opposite it. It is a good way of finding one’s way about Europe, and I have used it often enough.

  I remember once in Linz on the Danube getting such a vocabulary from a priest, being myself as hopeless at German as at any other foreign tongue. I recommend the method to all those who have any Latin. As for those who have none, they may drown themselves.

  The composite schoolmaster and railway man wrote down at the end of this vocabulary the Swedish word for a person of noble birth, which is much the same as the German name. He wrote down the word Adel. Having done this he took out a visiting card on which was his name and that of his wife. After his wife’s name was the description née von So-and-so. He pointed this out to me with pride and repeated ‘Adel—nobilis.’

  I like this simplicity. It argues great virtue, just as the opposite habit of concealing rank argues an odious exaggeration of its value. It is a good thing, is all this human cobweb of ranks and titles, for it binds history together, it attaches the sons to the fathers and, what is more important, it gives diversity, it is picturesque. But it is an absurd thing to worship. However, man must worship something.

  On that same initial entry into Scandinavia I had seen under the moonlight for the first time the Great Lakes. This also I never forgot. Gothenburg, I was told in a book which I picked up on board, was founded by Gustavus Vasa. If that is true it is a feather in the cap of this outrageous buccaneer. He spotted the right place, free from the toll and narrows of the Sound, emancipated from the threat of Elsinore and its guns, and I read in the same book that it was through Gothenburg that the English supplies were sent during the Napoleonic Wars, to Sweden and so across the Baltic to Russia, thereby turning the flank of Napoleon’s blockade. Not that England’s evasion of the continental blockade had the importance which our history books give it from a national and most excusable bias. It was not the trickle of English trade that defeated the Emperor, it was the fatal expedition into Russia, the grave of his cavalry and the mortal wounding of his vast armies.