GIBRALTAR
That is why I won’t even bother to tell you the names of most of them. The Tagus on which Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, is situated is an exception. It is navigable almost as far as the Spanish-Portuguese frontier. The Ebro too in northern Spain, which runs through Navarre and Catalonia, can be used by smaller vessels, but larger ones have to pass most of the way through a canal which runs parallel with the river itself. The Guadalquivir (Wadi-el-Kebir, or Big River of the Moors) which connects Seville with the Atlantic Ocean can only be used by vessels that draw less than fifteen feet. Between Seville and Cordova, the famous Moorish capital that used to boast of no less than nine hundred public baths before the Christians captured it and reduced the population from 200,000 to 50,000 and the public baths from 900 to 0, the Guadalquivir is only available for small vessels. After that it becomes what most Spanish rivers are, canyon rivers which are a great hindrance to overland trade while contributing practically nothing to commerce along the water routes.
Generally speaking, therefore, Nature was not particularly kind to the Spaniard. The great central part of the country consisted of a high plateau, divided into halves by a low mountain ridge. Old Castile is the name of the northern half and New Castile that of the other. The dividing ridge is called the Sierra de Guadarrama.
The name ‘Castile,’ which merely means ‘castle,’ is a very pretty name. But it resembles those boxes of Spanish cigars of which the label is so much more imposing than the quality of the contents. For Castile is as harsh and ill-favoured a land as may be found anywhere. When General Sherman, after his march through Georgia, remarked that henceforth a crow wishing to cross the Shenandoah Valley would have to pack his own rations, he was consciously or unconsciously quoting a remark which the Romans made 2000 years before when they said that a nightingale trying to cross Castile would have to take its food and drink with it or it would die of hunger and thirst. For the mountains which surround this plateau are sufficiently high to prevent the clouds that arise from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean from reaching this unfortunate tableland.
As a result, Castile suffers from nine months of inferno and during the other three months of the year it is exposed to the cold and dry winds which sweep across this treeless tract with such a merciless fury that sheep are the only animals that can live here with any degree of comfort, while the only plant that prospers is a variety of grass, the esparto or halfa grass, which is very tough and can therefore be used for basket-work.
But most of this tableland, called the meseta by the Spaniards (a word which you meet again in ‘mesas,’ familiar to those who know New Mexico), is something that closely resembles a plain, ordinary desert, and that makes you understand why Spain and Portugal, although much larger than England, have only half the population of the British Isles.
For further particulars about the shabby poverty of these regions, I refer you to the works of a certain Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. You may remember that the “ingenious hidalgo,” who was his hero, bore the proud name of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Well, Mancha was one of those inland deserts with which the plateau of Castile was dotted then as it is now, a bleak, inhospitable stretch of waste land near Toledo, the ancient Spanish capital. The name itself was ominous to Spanish ears, for in the original Arabic, al mansha, it meant ‘wilderness,’ and the poor Don was really the ‘Lord of the Wilderness.’
In a country like that, where Nature is both stingy and obstinate, Man must either settle down to hard labour and force her to yield him the necessities of life, or he can choose to live as the average Spaniard lives, who as a rule can load all the family possessions on the back of one very small donkey. And that brings us to one of the greatest tragedies that ever occurred as a result of a country’s unfortunate geographic position.
Eight hundred years ago, the country belonged to the Moors, It was not the first time the Iberian peninsula had been invaded. For the country possessed valuable mineral deposits. Two thousand years ago copper, zinc, and silver were what petroleum is to-day. Wherever copper, zinc, and silver were to be found, rival armies would fight for their possession. When the Mediterranean was divided into two great armed camps, and when the Semites (of Carthage, a colony of the Phoenicians and ruthless in its exploitation of subject nations) and the Romans (not of Semitic origin but quite as ruthless in their exploitation of subject nations) were throwing loaded dice (one of the chief early uses made of lead was for the purpose of loading dice) for the treasures of the world, Spain could not long escape her fate. Like many a modern land, unfortunately blessed with natural riches, Spain was turned into a battle-ground for the mercenaries of two large groups of organized brigands.
As soon as they were gone, the country was used as a convenient land bridge for wild tribes from northern Europe trying to break into Africa.
And then, early during the seventh century, a camel driver in Arabia had a vision and started a number of desert tribes, of whom no one had heard, on the war-path, bound for world-domination. A century later they had conquered all northern Africa and were ready to tackle Europe. In the year 711 a certain Tarik sailed for the famous Monkey Rock (the only spot in Europe where monkeys continued to live in a wild state) and without meeting any opposition landed his troops near Gibraltar, the famous rock which during the last two hundred years has belonged to England.
Thereafter the old Pillars of Hercules, the straits which Hercules had dug by the simple process of pushing the mountains of Europe and Africa aside, belonged to the Mohammedans.
Could the Spaniards have defended themselves successfully against this invasion? They tried to. But the geography of their country prevented any concerted action, for the mountain-ranges which ran a parallel course and the rivers with their deep canyons divided the country into a number of independent little squares. Remember that even to-day some 5000 Spanish villages have no direct communication with each other or any other part of the world except by a narrow track which pedestrians who do not suffer from dizziness may use during certain parts of the year.
And then remember one of the few definite facts which history and geography teach us, that such countries are breeding places for clannishness. Now clannishness has undoubtedly certain good qualities. It makes the members of the same clan loyal to each other and loyal to the common or clan interests. But Scotland and the Scandinavian peninsula are there to show us that clannishness is the deadly enemy of all forms of economic co-operation and national organization. Island dwellers are supposed to be ‘insular’ and to care for nothing except the affairs of their own little islet. But they at least can sit themselves down in a boat once in a while and spend an afternoon with their neighbours, or rescue the crew of a ship-wrecked vessel and hear what the big world is doing. The man of the valley, shut off from the rest of humanity by an almost impassable mountain ridge, has no one but himself and his neighbours, and they in turn have no one but themselves and their neighbours.
The conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was possible because the Moors, although a desert people and therefore great worshippers of the restricted ‘tribal’ idea, were for once united under strong leaders who had given them a common national purpose which made them forget their own petty ambitions. While the Spanish clans fought each one for itself and hated their rival clans as cordially as they hated the common enemy who was driving them out of house and home (and often more so), the Mohammedans obeyed a single head.
The seven centuries during which the great Spanish war of liberation lasted are an endless recital of treachery and rivalry between the little Christian states of the north that survived because the Pyrenees formed a barrier across which they could not hope to retreat without getting into trouble with the French, who, after a few vague gestures on the part of Charlemagne, had left them completely to their own fate.
Meanwhile the Moors had turned southern Spain into a veritable garden. These desert people appreciated the value of water, and they loved the flowers and trees which were s
o sadly lacking in their own part of the world. They constructed vast irrigation works and imported the orange, the date, the almond tree, sugar-cane, and cotton. They set the Guadalquivir to work to turn the valley between Cordova and Seville into one vast huerta or garden where the farmer was able to reap as many as four harvests every year. They tapped the Jucar River, which flows into the Mediterranean near Valencia, and added another 1200 square miles of fertile land to their possessions. They imported engineers, built universities where agriculture was scientifically studied, and constructed about the only roads the country possesses to this very day. What they did for the progress of astronomy and mathematics we have already seen in the first part of this book. And they were the only people in the Europe of that day who paid the slightest attention to medicine and hygiene, carrying their tolerance in such matters so far that they reintroduced the works of the ancient Greeks into the west by means of their own Arabic translations. And they set another force to work which was to be of tremendous value to them. Instead of shutting the Jews up in ghettos or worse, they gave them free rein to develop their great commercial and organizing power for the benefit of the country at large.
And then the inevitable happened. Almost the whole of the country had been conquered, and there was little danger from the side of the Christians. Other Arab and Berber tribes, thirsting in their miserable deserts, heard news of this terrestrial Paradise. And since Mohammedan rule was autocratic, the success or failure of that rule depended upon the ability of a single person. Amid these luxurious surroundings, dynasties founded by strong-armed ploughboys degenerated and became weak. Other strong-armed ploughboys, still sweating behind their oxen, cast envious eyes upon the joys of the Alhambra of Granada and the Alcazar of Seville. There were civil wars. There was murder. Whole families were wiped out. Others pushed to the front. Meanwhile, in the north the strong man had made his appearance. Clans were being combined into tiny principalities. Tiny principalities were being combined into small states. The Catholic banner was unfurled. Men began to hear the names of Castile and Leon and Aragon and Navarre. Finally they forgot their ancient rivalries long enough to marry Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabel of Castile, the land of the castles.
During this great war of liberation—Catholic against Moor—over three thousand pitched battles were fought. The Church turned the racial struggle into a conflict of religious aspirations. The Spaniard became the soldier of the Cross—a most noble ambition which was to bring ruin to the country for which he so valiantly fought. For in the same year that the last of the Moorish strongholds, Granada, was taken from the Moors, Columbus discovered the road to America. Six years later Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape and found the direct route to the Indies. Therefore, just at the moment when the Spaniard should have taken possession of his own home and should have continued to develop those latent natural forces of his country which had been set into motion by the Moors, he came into easy money. His religious feeling of exaltation made it easy for him to imagine himself a holy missionary when in reality he was nothing but an uncommon (because uncommonly brutal and greedy) brigand. In 1519 he conquered Mexico. In 1532 he conquered Peru. After that he was lost. All further ambitions were drowned in the steady flow of gold which the cumbersome galleons dumped into the storehouses of Seville and Cadiz. No man would disgrace himself working with his hands when he could belong to the ‘gold collar class’ by demanding his share of the Aztec and Inca plunder.
All the painful work of the Moors became undone. The Moors themselves were forced to leave the country. Next the Jews went, thrown wholesale into filthy vessels to carry them, naked and deprived of all their possessions, wherever it pleased the captain of the ship to put them on land. Their hearts filled with revenge but their minds sharpened by their sufferings, they struck back at their tormenters, had a hand in every heretical enterprise that was directed against the hated name of Spain. But even Providence must take a hand and give these unfortunate sufferers of the Golden Illusion a monarch whose view of life did not extend beyond the cloistered cell he erected for himself in the palace of the Escurial, situated on the outskirts of the bleak Castilian plain, to which he had transferred his new capital city of Madrid.
Henceforth the riches of three continents and the man-power of an entire nation were to be used to curb the aggressions of the unbelievers, the Protestants of the north, the Mohammedans of the south. The Spanish people, changed by seven centuries of religious warfare into a race in whose eyes the supernatural had become the natural, willingly obeyed their royal master. And they bled to death in the attempt just as they impoverished themselves by growing too rich.
The Iberian peninsula made the Spanish people what they are to-day. Can the Spanish people now turn round and after centuries of neglect change the Iberian peninsula into what they want it to be, regardless of the past and with only an eye to the future?
They are trying, and in some cities they are trying very hard.
But what a job! What a job!
Chapter XI
* * *
FRANCE, THE COUNTRY THAT HAS EVERYTHING SHE WANTS
We often hear it said that France does not consider herself a part of the rest of the world, that the French people, who live on a continent, are infinitely more ‘insular’ than their English neighbours who dwell in rainy solitude on an island; in short, that the French, by their persistent and systematic refusal to take any interest, however slight, in the affairs of this planet, are the most selfish and self-centred of all nations and are at the bottom of most of our present troubles.
Well, in order to understand things thoroughly, we must go down to their roots. The roots of any given people are situated deep down in the soil and in the soul. The soil has influenced the soul and the soul has influenced the soil. We cannot understand the one without understanding the other. But when we have grasped the true inner meaning of both, we have a key to the character of almost any nation.
Most of the accusations we hear so often uttered against the French are based upon the truth. But so was that unbounded and unquestioning praise heaped upon them during the days of the Great War, for both their virtues and their defects grew directly out of the geographic position of their country. It had made them self-centred and self-contented, because the land they occupied between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean was absolutely self-sufficient for their needs. Why go abroad for changes of climate or changes in scenery when you can find all of those in your own backyard? Why travel all over the globe to study differences of language and habits and customs when a few hours in a train will carry you from the twentieth to the twelfth century or from a smiling, verdant country of castles to the magnificent mysteries of a land of sand dunes and solemn pine trees? Why bother about passports or letters of credit and bad food and sour wine and the dull, stodgy faces of frozen northern peasants when your own food and drink and beds and conversation are about as good as any this vale of tears can provide, when you live in a land where (believe it or not!) they can make spinach a dish fit for human consumption?
Of course a poor Swiss, who has never seen anything except a mountain, or a poor Dutchman, who has never seen anything except a flat piece of green meadow with a few black and white cows, must go abroad once in a while or he would die of boredom. A German will sooner or later tire of his exclusive diet of excellent music interspersed with indifferent sausage-sandwiches. An Italian cannot live on spaghetti, all his life long. And a Russian must crave an occasional meal without standing six hours in line for half a pound of oleomargarine.
But the Frenchman, lucky devil, lives in an earthly paradise where all things are to be had by all men without a change of cars, and therefore he will ask you, “Why should I stir from my own country?”
You may answer that this is a hopelessly one-sided point of view and that my Frenchman is all wrong. I wish I could agree with you, but I am forced to aver that France in many respects is a country singularly blessed by Nature and its general geographical bac
kground.
In the first place, France has every sort of climate. It has a temperate climate. It has a hot climate. It has a medium climate. France is the proud possessor of the highest mountain in Europe. At the same time, the French have been able to connect all the industrial centres of their land with canals that run through absolutely flat country. If a Frenchman likes to spend his winter sliding down the slopes of a hill, he moves to a village in the Savoy in the western branch of the Alps. Does he prefer swimming to ski-ing, all he need do is to take a ticket for Biarritz on the Atlantic or to Cannes on the Mediterranean. And should he be of a particular curiosity about men and women, should he interest himself in the outward aspect of monarchs in exile and exiles about to turn monarchs, of actors with a future before them and actresses with a future behind them, of fiddle virtuosos or paragons of the piano, of dancers who have lightly upset a couple of thrones, and all the other great little people who are in the limelight, he need merely take a chair in the Café de la Paix, and order himself a glass of coffee and cream, and wait. Sooner or later every man, woman, or child who has filled the front page of the world’s newspapers will pass that corner. And what is more, they will pass that corner without attracting any particular attention.
FRANCE
Here we come upon one of the unanswerable mysteries of political geography. Two thousand years ago most of the territory that flies the Republican tricolour (and flies it day and night, for the French, once they have hoisted a flag, never pull it down until time and the weather have reduced it to unrecognizable shreds) was part of the great western European plain and there was no earthly (that is to say, geographic) reason why some day this land between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean should become the home of one of the most highly centralized nations of the world.
The Home of Mankind Page 11
