Competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very
strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's
beehive, nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's
railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such
nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the
means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of
the ownership of the concentrated means of production? And they shake
their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it
first and see. Then they fly into a rage.
When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked
me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the
navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels,
experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world) - when, I
say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on
my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on
falling.
In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the
mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings
made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry
itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and
in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry,
therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two
things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed
me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the
Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.
To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a
powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in
the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides
and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my
part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with
two very good feelings - - laughter and companionship. For it was my
good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two
men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been
some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots - and for
the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the
anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty
cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous
noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the
over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two
friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a
loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders
to challenge once and then to fire.
Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a
conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
a growing tree.
This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
explain it. It was a good gun in its time - now they have the
seventy-five that doesn't recoil - _requiescat), _and of how they were
longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.
Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
went down the road.
Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.
Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses -
_Ave Crux Spes Unica._
I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
looked backward along the road I had come.
There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind
of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even
the high hills.
Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to
the influences that had followed me for so many miles - the solemn
quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of
Lorraine - 1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and
pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.
