MARGINAL COMMENT

Ly HAROLD NICOLSON

WHEN the stern strokes of Big Ben hush their vibrations on the still air, we listen in anxious excitement to the calm voice of the announcer as he tells us of the battle of our two great armies and of their French and American allies. Tunisian names float across the ether—names which have only become known to us during the laV six months or names which evoke faint tourist memories of the hotels which were illustrated on the posters and in the folders of the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique. Yet we are aware also that this gigantic battle is now reaching historic ground, that our tanks already churn meadows once stamped upon by the elephants of Juba or Hasdrubal, and that the sappers auscultate for min'ts along roads once traversed by the legions of Belisarius and Caesar. Already perhaps some corporal in a county regiment has seen the distant stain in the hot air, a stain of green and white, which marks the gardens and palaces of what to the ancients was known as " shining Tunis " ; and already from the hill of Keftouro the French have seen the sun glint on the wide lagoon which marks the site of Hippu Zarytus, or Bizerta. Already our men have passed the battlefield of Thapsus, where Caesar dealt his final blow to the Republicans between the marshes and the sea. As I write these words the Eighth Army may already be in Hamamet, or Neapolis. Already the two great promontories of Hermes and Apollo have shimmered through the haze ; already our Spitfires have swooped round the cliff where Dido bewailed Aeneas and where the great citadel of Carthage rose above the gulf. Three times in history have those few square miles witnessed the destruction of great armies ; and on this fourth occasion it may be given to us, between the mountains and the sea, to win one of the world's resounding victories.

I am always fascinated by those frail filaments which spread like some weed beneath the soil of history, emerging suddenly at un- expected points. It amuses me, for instance, to consider that that most familiar of all ingredients, sauce mayonnaise, can trace its name back to a Phoenician origin. Since the man who invented (or is supposed to have invented) that condiment was cook to the Commandant of Port Mahon or Portus Magonis, the eponym of which was Mago the Carthaginian, son of Hanno, who annexed the Balearic Isles. It may well be that within a few weeks the men of the First Army will stand upon the Byrsa of Carthage or stroll through the museum which Pere Delattre assembled, gazing without interest at the Punic shards on which are stamped the disc of Baal-Ammon and the cre ;cent of Tanit. Some of them will have heard of Hannibal and Hasdrubal, of Cato and Regulus ; some of them will have heard of the Three Punic Wars, and will remember how Marius was also seen to sit among the Carthaginian ruins. Some even will have heard of Elissa, daughter of the King of Tyre, who as Dido displayed such marked incompetence as the hostess of Aeneas. And there will be some even (for our army contains every type) who will recall how Flaubert, in his sunny little house at Croisset, wrote a striking book about Carthage telling a long story of the mutiny of the mercenaries (the bellum inexpiabtle) and the love of Matho for Salammbo, daughter of Hamilcar. They will recall his description of the great temples on the Acropolis, of the houses, painted black with bitumen, falling in terrace after terrace to the sea. They will recall the great purple awnings draped above the garden banquets, the peacocks nesting in the cedars, the chameleons creeping upon the cactus leaves, the great braziers steaming with Abyssinian gums. They will recall a Carthage opulent and sinister, vague and terrifying as its unnamed gods, and they will remember how the lions roared around the suburbs and the baboons gibbered through the colonnades. * * * * The tanks, the armoured cars, the lorries, the scout-cars and the little jeeps will stream along the dusty road to Sukhara, and some there will be who know that this is Utica where Cato died. Here it was that Curio, the friend of Caesar, was overwhelmed and killed by the Numidians, and here it was that the great Stoic was abandoned and committed suicide. There may be some even, fresh from the University, who will smile to remember that it was in Utica that the Cato of Addison was staged. I doubt whether, in fact, any man in our great armies has read the Cato of the ingenious Mr. Addison. It is indeed a desolate drama, rendered popu'ar at the time by its implied criticism of the Duke of Marlborough, but only redeemed today by two most lovely lines: " Virtues which shun the day and lie concealed In the smooth seasons and the calms of life."

It may well happen that in the final stages of this huge campaign our men will rest at Sukhara or that the enemy may make some desperate stand upon the little escarpment which Caesar mentions, upon the site of the Castra Cornelia. A few, perhaps, a very few, will know and recognise these things. But even to others there may come some intimation that, having fought through Libya from the east, through Numidia from the west, they have jointly reached a tiny angle which is haunted by gigantic ghosts. * * * Even the little places have their tradition. The Mejerda valley, which for six months has become so familiar to the First Army, has many a classical association. Polybius calls the river the " Makaras," the name being derived from Mokar, the Tyrian Hercules. The Romans, by a familiar transposition, called it the "Bagradas," and it was the Arabs, as has often happened, who reverted to an approximation of its original Punic name. Caesar mentions it incidentally in referring to "The Camp by the Bagradas "—in castra ad Bagradam. Lucan, in describing the stockade established by Curio, calls it a sluggish stream. " Slowly," he writes, " the Bragadas pushes on and furrows the dry sand." But the strangest reference to the Bragadas or Mejerda is contained in the pages of the Punica of Silius Italicus. Nobody, I hope, reads the Punica.

It is the longest of all Latin poems, and even Pliny, who had much affection for Silius Italicus, thought it painstaking but dull. Silius was a rich and cultured man, who had travelled widely throughout the Empire, and whose main vestige of renown is due to his purchase of the site at Naples where Virgil was buried and his careful restoration and maintenance of the poet's tomb. In his old age he wrote his enormous and unreadable epic on the Punk Wars.

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This poem he would insist on reciting aloud to his guests even after eighteen hundred years some echo of their yawns corni, down the centuries. But I was amused to find that he had mentioned the Mejerda, and I turned up the Sixth Book of the Punica to see what he had said. In a paraphrase of Lucan's words (a paraphrase

which I fear can scarcely have been accidental) he states that the Mejerda "furrows the dry sands with sluggish foot" (" Turbidt“ arentes lento pede sulcat harems "). And he adds that no river al of Libya carries down so thick a deposit to the sea. It is, in fact. the case that the Mejerda, which used to reach the sea immediately to the south of Utica, has today changed its mouth, and that the silt which it has for centuries deposited has now filled up the little bay on which the city of Utica once stood. But the rest of Silius's story is dull indeed. He tells of the Naiads that haunt the Mejerda's pools. And he devotes 15o lines to the description of a Dragon who lived in a cave of the Mejerda Valley, feeding upon lions, and who was finally slain by Regulus. That is the fable of the river which runs under the bridge at Medjez-el-Bab and along the defile on which for six long months the First Army have gazed. They also, as their Roman predecessors, have given to the hills and valleys names drawn from the vernacular. They also have sometimes kept

the local names, giving to them strange twists of pronunciation, re- moulding Phoenician sounds. Nor did Silius, nursing his ill-health, churning out his endless hexameters in a villa which had once belonged to Cicero, awaiting with impatience the arrival of the patient Pliny, ever dream that the Barbarians of the north would one day give to the Mejerda a fame greater even than that which Regulus conferred.

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