The New Jerusalem | Page 7

of mine
described his book, The Path to Rome, as a journey through all Europe
that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describe my own
journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved. The trail of

the actual fighting, of course, was awfully apparent everywhere; the
plantations of pale crosses seemed to crop up on every side like
growing things; and the first French villages through which I passed
had heard in the distance, day and night, the guns of the long battle-line,
like the breaking of an endless exterior sea of night upon the very
borderland of the world. I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of
Amiens, so near the high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in
that night of terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth
which thus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the
metaphor of the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the
world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of
something as solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land,
against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as
strong as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood. It was the
resistance of form to formlessness; that version or vision of it seemed
to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defence of that
same ancient enclosure in which stood the broken columns of the
Roman forum and the column in the Paris square, and of all other such
enclosures down to the domestic enclosures of my own dog and donkey.
All had the same design, the marking out of a square for the experiment
of liberty; of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty. I knew,
to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the West had again
proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient. For the foes of such
creative limits are chaos and old night, whether they are the Northern
barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drill against the civic ideal
of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that brought brigands out of the wilds
of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium. And as in the other case,
what I saw was something simpler and larger than all the disputed
details about the war and the peace. A man may think it extraordinary,
as I do, that the natural dissolution of the artificial German Empire into
smaller states should have actually been prevented by its enemies,
when it was already accepted in despair by its friends. For we are now
trying hard to hold the Prussian system together, having hammered
hard for four mortal years to burst it asunder. Or he may think exactly
the opposite; it makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind. A
man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we should clear the
Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople. For that is

driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage and pasturage, and
giving up to them our own European and Christian city; it is as if the
Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome. But he may think
exactly the opposite; and the larger and simpler truth will still be there.
It was that the weeds and wild things had been everywhere breaking
into our boundaries, climbing over the northern wall or crawling
through the eastern gate, so that the city would soon have been
swallowed in the jungle. And whether the lines had been redrawn
logically or loosely, or particular things cleared with consistency or
caprice, a line has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been
made somehow. The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at
least capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics of the
war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics which even
the war had never touched at all; I felt the change as much in the
changeless East as in the ever-changing West. I felt it when I crossed
another great square in Paris to look at a certain statue, which I had last
seen hung with crape and such garlands as we give the dead; but on
whose plain pedestal nothing now is left but the single word
"Strasbourg." I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil
on a wall in a poor street in Brindisi; Italia vittoriosa. But I felt it as
much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote; in
those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down upon