Return to the Baltic by Hilaire Belloc

Author:Hilaire Belloc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1958-03-22T05:00:00+00:00

Upsala

§

It is one of the difficulties of writing on travel that while half the interest of places is remembering what happened there, each man has read his own amount of history and his own selection thereof so that only a part of what will interest one traveller will interest that one or this one of his readers. But the writer must take his chance and write upon what appeals to him.

Thus for me the interest of a site is not only its appeal to the eye and the physical use made of it, but some one or other of the things that have happened there and of the people in the past who acted there and of the history attaching to the appeals one finds there.

Thus at Upsala I particularly felt the appeal of the Codex Argenteus; but I suppose to ninety-nine readers out of one hundred so special a point has no meaning. It is most unlikely that even that small proportion of one’s readers should have even heard of the Codex and the discussion it has aroused. Before I had read about the Codex, Upsala meant nothing to me, save (vaguely) the name of a Northern University and rather more as the original seed plot of Swedish monarchy. Yet to-day after all the reading I have done on that rather recondite subject Upsala means hardly anything else but the Codex.

So with battlefields. They interest me passionately when I have read of the action, and the more in proportion as I have read it in detail. When I discovered a few years ago that little fold of land which alone explains Marlborough’s tactic at Ramillies and was the cause of his great victory as well as the proof of his eye for terrain, I felt as enthusiastic as a man who has come on a huge nugget of gold. When I had come in by a Crécy side road and looked over Crécy town on to Crécy wood, I saw on my left Edward’s army deployed upon the right, the baggage behind it, the great unformed mass of feudal cavalry in the Val aux Clercs, as though they were before me, and I was so conscious of that little mound on which the windmill Stood, whence Edward surveyed the battle, that it is not a little mound to me any more, but a windmill actually there, though the real mill has long disappeared. So in the waters of Stockholm I see under the falling dusk the supernatural voyage of that boat which was guided by the light shining from a severed hand and Marie Antoinette’s ring, and in the Streets near the Palace I see the mob surging round to murder poor Fersen.

Talking of Fersen, how true it is that history cannot be written by those who do not know men: that is the irremovable obstacle to excellence in academic history. That is why no academic histories talk sense, and hardly any are readable, for what do dons know of men? The old saying that readable history is false and true history is unreadable is wrong.

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