Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a lifelong companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard of the fall of the Bastille from an eyewitness; and that would be as though some very old person today were to tell one that he had spoken to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very old person today were to remember having met in childhood a person who had talked to one who had seen John Milton.
The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!) been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were many others.
Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided; they remain divided today upon the issue after more than thirty years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure the conviction of a man against whom there was strong prima facie evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser, but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers, one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were above the law.
I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court, and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.
Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.
There are in England today two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society, enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for, the other against.
I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained, or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend, intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.
The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that we owe the four years of war, 1914–18: for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi.
Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical oppositions.
It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation which as a fact has been carefully avoided.
For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity “drawn up” upon a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use, but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach. Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Caesar landed at Deal
