GIBBON AND THE WAR.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
ISze,—For any one in these strenuous days of war to sit down and read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shows perhaps either a discreditable leisure or a lack of sympathy with the urgency of present events. Nevertheless, to any one willing to linger over it and take ten months to its ten volumes, in place of Carlyle's ten days, it proves to be most appropriate reading. It resounds with the clash of Empires, and tells the histories of the countries, places, and peoples of which our newspapers are at present full ; and one finds concise criticisms of nations and wars in Gibbon's own most trenchant style, as well as inferences and prophecies peculiarly suited to present circumstances in Europe. The Central Empires, the Balkans, and Turkey are the scenes of many of its chapters, and it is interesting to note how the nations as we know them retain, or in some cases lose, their ancient characteristics. Thus of Germany it is said : "A little before the age of Caesar the Germans, abusing their superiority of valour, had occupied a considerable portion of Belgic territory."" Again in the fifteenth century as now, "Germany was an inexhaustible storehouse of men and arms" ;2 while of her people it is said "The wide extent of country" (about A.D. 250) " might very possibly contain a million warriors, as all who were of an age to bear arms were of a temper to use them."3 And, for the other side of the picture : "Such an act of treachery" (on the part of Rome) 'would destroy the confidence, and excite the -resentment, of the independent warriors of Germany, who considered truth as the noblest of their virtues and freedom the most valuable of their possessions."4 Is not the Kaiser proving again in these days the truth of Voltaire's words when he wrote : " Celui qui fait la guerre k. sa patrie an nom de Dieu eat capable de tout."3 Also of the Goths, the ancestors in a double Dense of the Germans of to-day, it is written : "They affected to depreciate an element in which they were unskilled "—that is, the sea- " but their own experience confirmed the truth of a maxim, that the master of the sea will always acquire the dominion of the land,"6 which we would hope to take as a prophecy for ourselves, though not in the sense of increasing our dominions, and provided our Navy continues to play the great part it has played since the beginning of the war. Gibbon, however, gives us a warning too in that respect. In A.D. 296, when Constantius had to recover his revolted province of Britain, the invading army of Rome, "under cover of a thick fog, escaped the fleet of Allectus which had been stationed off the Isle of Wight to receive them, landed in safety on some part of the Western coast, and convinced the Britons that a superiority of naval strength will not always protect their country from foreign invasion."7 Of the Greeks we do not gain a very favourable impression from Gibbon. "An act of fraud is always credible when it is told of the Greekti,"8 he writes, and "The Athenians are still distinguished by the subtlety and acuteness of their understandings ; but these qualities, unless ennobled by freedom, and enlightened by study, will degenerate into a low and selfish cunning : and it is a proverbial saying of the country 'From the Jews of Thessalonica, the Turks of Negropont, and the Greeks of Athens, good Lord deliver us ! ' "9 Our campaign in Gallipoli is linked to the heroic past when we read of the Crusaders, in 1203, traversing the Bosphorus, and our Anzac brothers fulfil again the old spirit—" To land the foremost was the wish, to conquer or die was the resolution, of every division and of every soldier."30 And there is some solace in the words that the Emperor Manuel, in 1422, 'concluded a treaty with Mohammed, son of Bajazet, "whose progress was checked by the insuperable barrier of Gallipoli,"fl however much • (1) Vol. I., p. 21. (2) VI.. p. 400. (3) I., 228. (4) II., 326. (5) V., 264. (6) IV., 347. (7) I., 349. (8) V., 582. (9) VI., 246. (10) VI., 159. (11) VI., 340. (12) IV., 532. (13) VI., 430. (14) IV., 192. (15) VI., 70. (16) VI., 445. (17) VI., 173.-2'lte Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon, Everyman'e
we may have hoped and believed that what was insuperable to the Ottoman forces would not prove so to the men of our Empire.
There is an interesting reference in Vol. V., p. 630, to a mysterious prophecy, said to have been attached to a statue in the Square of Taurus, " how the Russians, in the last days, should be masters of Constanti. nople." Are these last days drawing near ? Is the time coming for the consideration of terms of peace and a settlement of the future partition of Europe ? When that time does come, God grant it be not said of our conflict, as of the great struggle between Rome and Persia, in 628, when peace was made, that "a war which had wounded the vitals of two monarchies produced no change in their external and relative position "12—surely of all tragedies the one most strenuously to be avoided! And another humiliation that we should dread would be that of any section of the sons of our land it could be said : "The man who dare* not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature."13 Have there not been instances also in this world-contest of what Gibbon speaks so tersely when he says : "By a precaution that inspired the cowardice which it foresaw, convenient fortresses were erected for their retreat "? 14 And when the Pope, "by a humane incon- sistency," strove to prohibit the use in Christian wars of the deadly weapon known as the arbalistn we find expression again of that paradox which perplexes many in these days —the desire that war to the death might be waged as gently and humanely as possible. "War," writes Gibbon, is "a necessary though pernicious science,"14 and that it is possible for anything to be both necessary and harmful at the same time touches the central mystery of life. "In the miserable account of war, the gain is never equivalent to the loss, the pleasure to the pain."17 Yet we can only trust that if this be the stern truth in a material and physical sense, there is an elevating and an intensifying of the spiritual element in a nation, as the outcome of the agonies and sacrifices of war, that is inestimable in influenee and importanae in the forward progress of the world. —I am, Sir, &c., M. D. BLYTH. Bakonie, Skelmorlie, Ayrshire.
Previous page
