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Collingwood s The Idea of History A Reader s Guide Reader s Guides 1st
Edition Peter Johnson
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David Foster Wallace s Infinite Jest A Reader s Guide
Bloomsbury Reader’s Guides are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.
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ISBN: 978-1-4411-2114-1
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Cont E nts
Acknowledgements vii
Text ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction xiii
A note about reading xxi
1 Background to the text 1
Text 1
Contex 5
Development 17
Collingwood’s idea of history: structural features 23
2 Collingwood’s great discovery: The autonomy of history 27
Realism 27
History – is it art or science? 31
The autonomy of history 34
History and human purpose 37
The inside/outside theory 38
Human history 40
What and why 41
Re-enactment 44
Inference 45
History and imagination 46
History and self-knowledge 48
Conclusion 50
3
Arguing with Collingwood (I) 53
The problem of re-enactment 53
The problem of imagination in history 64
The problem of historical evidence 70
The problem of historical inference 77
The logic of question and answer 82
4 Arguing with Collingwood (II) 87
Past, present and future 87
The limits of history: thoughts and feelings 92
Past lives 98
Facts and fictions 104
History, politics and progress 111
5
Receptions and reactions 127
Reception 127
Reviews 130
Reactions 142
Influences and affinities 147
Conclusion 150
Glossary 153
Further reading 155
Index 173
AC knowl EDGE m E nts
This Reader’s Guide is aimed at aiding students who come to R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History for the first time. Even so, in writing it I have been helped more than once by those writers on Collingwood for whom understanding his thought has been a lifetime’s project. I am deeply indebted to all the commentators on Collingwood’s writings, especially those who have not held back on criticism of his ideas. In terms of exegesis two labourers in the Collingwood vineyard stand out – William H. Dray and Jan van der Dussen – since their efforts in making Collingwood’s philosophy of history accessible in a comprehensive form is what has made modern interpretations of it possible. Naturally, any errors of understanding are my own.
The edition used throughout (IH) is R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Revised Edition, With Lectures 1926–1928, edited with an Introduction by Jan van der Dussen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993 (paperback, Oxford University Press, 1994)
‘Were they like that?’ Isa asked abruptly. ‘The Victorians,’ Mrs Swithin mused. ‘I don’t believe’, she said with her odd little smile, ‘that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently.’ ‘You don’t believe in history’, said William.
VIRGINIa WOOLF. (1941) BeTween THe AcTs
A BB r E v IA t I ons
A an autobiography
IH The Idea of History
PA The Principles of art
PE The Philosophy of Enchantment
PH The Principles of History
SM Speculum Mentis
Intro D u C t I on
R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History is a remarkable book. It has an author’s name and a title, but the title is one the author chose for a different purpose and he had no say in arranging the book’s contents. For The Idea of History was published in 1946, some three years after its author’s death, but, unlike The Idea of nature which also appeared posthumously, Collingwood’s major work on the philosophy of history is not a continuous piece of writing, but a collection of material put together by somebody else.
These facts about The Idea of History are well known and have not affected its status as one of the enduring works of twentiethcentury philosophy. Students of the philosophy of history turn to Collingwood with as much expectation as students of aesthetics search out his other ground-breaking text, The Principles of Art. Collingwood’s work is made seminal by its arguments and the understanding of history these arguments support. His reflections on history are radical and he wished to present them in a manner which reflected their philosophical distinctiveness, but in the face of multiplying obstacles his road ahead became increasingly uncertain, so there is a sense in which Collingwood’s writings on the philosophy of history lack a completely finished pattern. They are open to reconstruction, but they are also prone to misunderstanding. By sorting out the arguments about history that Collingwood means to defend from those with which he has been wrongly burdened, the Reader’s Guide aims to help students of Collingwood to understand and criticize his ideas. Equally, by explaining the development of Collingwood’s thinking about history the Guide aims to show how and when he arrived at his views, together with the understandings of history he rejects.
There is no doubt about the importance that Collingwood attaches to history. Of all the problems faced by modern philosophy he believed that the problem of history – its nature,
aims and methods – was the most pressing. It is true, of course, that Collingwood wrote on art, religion and philosophy itself with a close to equivalent urgency, but he believed that history had been made the poor relation of modern philosophy and it was because he believed this that he undertook the philosophical re-examination of history as his life’s work. Rather more startlingly, perhaps, Collingwood also believed that the nature of history was too singular a topic to be left to the authority of professional historians. Collingwood was a renowned archaeologist and historian of Roman Britain, but while his philosophy of history is heavily concerned with the methodology of historical enquiry he argues almost to the point of perversity that history’s importance does not derive exclusively from what historians do. The actual practice of historical writing is certainly vital, but in Collingwood’s hands history is not the personal possession of historians. Human beings are temporal creatures. They live at a particular historical time, and their lives are framed in terms of memory and imagination as well as expectation and hope. In this sense, for Collingwood, history is less like a specialized form of knowledge than a basis for common understanding. The activities of my neighbour in her front garden on a Sunday morning in June, deciphering a Roman inscription, reading a nineteenth-century diary, tracking the movements of French troops across the terrain north of Paris during the battle of the Marne, are each exercises in historical understanding. Collingwood’s response to the neglect of history has the effect of raising our aspirations for it.
Collingwood’s philosophical investment in history is made largely to counter the belief that natural science is the paradigm form of knowledge. Take this belief as a working assumption for understanding the lives of human beings both past and present and much of human life becomes unintelligible. Historical understanding is an essential part of human understanding, and human understanding is what separates human beings from nature. The eruptions of volcanoes, the frequency of tidal waves both admit of chronologies, but chronologies are not history. Similarly, natural events can be explained causally, sometimes with the aim of constructing laws which allow predictions to be made, but human intentions are not like natural events and so they cannot be explained like them either. Given that Collingwood’s philosophy of history is based on a sharp distinction between history and science,
we may be surprised by his insistence that it is as a science that he wishes history to be recovered. But history does not become a science by aping natural science. Rather it becomes a science only through a greater self-consciousness of its autonomy. It is the distinctiveness of history that is the source of its creativity and its capacity for systematic understanding.
Philosophers often boast that they never discover anything. Certainly, Collingwood’s discovery of the autonomy of history is not like splitting the atom or locating a new species of butterfly in the rain forests of Brazil. Even so, what Collingwood’s philosophy of history discloses is nothing less than the logical basis of history and the vocabulary appropriate to it. He tells us how human beings think of their past, and he identifies the concepts that are necessary if his account is to be convincing. Thus, Collingwood speaks about historical re-enactment and about the sense in which the past is embedded in the present in the form of evidence. He speaks, too, about the role of the imagination in historical enquiry and about the logic of question and answer which is in his eyes the replacement for propositional logic and also the best account we have of how historical investigations actually work.
What a philosophy of history should aim at is established early. The job of philosophy is to reveal the logical character of the experience it is investigating. Since human understanding is diverse both in nature and object, what philosophy investigates may be the physical world and the scientific laws which govern it, the human world and the moral beliefs that are found in it, our religious beliefs or our ability to find some things beautiful and others not. Human activities presuppose criteria of understanding. The aim of philosophy is to tell us what these are. It is to reveal principles that are already implicit in experience. Philosophy proceeds in ways that are distinctive and it is self-reflective where art, science and history are not. It is, therefore, uniquely placed to distinguish the ways by which we understand the world.
The idea at work in The Idea of History is, then, a philosopher’s idea and as a preparation for the efforts ahead Collingwood tells us that history is to be distinguished in terms of its nature, object, method and value. History is first a form of enquiry. Its aim is to find things out by putting the material under investigation to the test. Second, history’s object is the past and this tells us what kinds of things historians mean to discover. They
are, as Collingwood puts it, ‘the actions of human beings as they have been done in the past’ (IH 9). Third, history’s methods are the collection and interpretation of evidence. Since the past is over, to be known at all it must be known indirectly, and this means through the availability of evidence. Finally, Collingwood answers his own question – What is history for? It is a form of self-knowledge. What human beings are capable of can be established only by looking at what they have done. Erase history and you take away human identity.
The job of a philosophy of history, then, is to show how history is possible given its distinctive object, method and value. No philosophy of history can proceed without a thorough knowledge of how historians and archaeologists go about their work. Collingwood himself was uniquely placed here, being a philosopher and an historian as well as a hugely experienced archaeologist. But the questions which are asked by historians and archaeologists are not the questions which philosophers ask. as Collingwood explains it himself, ‘for the philosopher, the fact demanding attention is neither the past by itself, as it is for the historian, nor the historian’s thought about it by itself, as it is for the psychologist, but the two things in their mutual relation’ (IH 2). The point is beautifully made. In teasing out the concepts which make art, science and history what they are, philosophers need to understand how artists, scientists and historians actually work, but they do not become artists, scientists and historians in doing so.
In the light of Collingwood’s determination to express historical knowledge as both autonomous and systematic it may seem odd that his thought about history has often been associated with relativism – the belief that truth is relative to given conceptual schemes and conceptual schemes can be traced historically, but not evaluated or compared since there is no standpoint from which we can make such an evaluation, apart from another conceptual scheme. The charge of relativism is one which we shall examine, but what should be clear is just how remote it is from the general character of Collingwood’s intentions. For Collingwood saw no point in weighing history down with a certainty which it could not deliver. False objectivity does not protect history from scepticism, and in history objectivity is false if it asks that the past is reproduced rather than re-enacted. Collingwood’s philosophy of history aims to show how systematic historical knowledge is possible, but
it insists also that it is not possible at all if we think of it in terms of scientific laws or law-like generalizations.
The rules which govern the acquisition of historical knowledge are demanding and intricate, but any attempt to show what these are will fail if it takes scientific objectivity – the testing of hypotheses by replication and the re-examination of data – as the only model for truth. Indeed, Collingwood goes out of his way to point out that this picture of historical knowledge as the establishment of fact is substantially incomplete. History is not just about lists of dates – the Kings and Queens of England, say, or the Reform acts; nor is it just about events and the causes of events – the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, say, or the assassination of an american President. Nor is history about the treatment of past experience as fact, since facts do not come to historians with their explanations already made. In Collingwood’s view, facts figure on the historian’s radar only after a complex process of inference has taken place. Similarly, events – say, Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow or the introduction of conscription in Britain in 1916 – will remain closed to historical understanding unless the historian can reconstruct the thoughts they involve. For, unlike the natural scientist, what confronts the historian is not a subject that can be investigated by means of experiment under controlled conditions, but a past, a region of experience which no longer exists, one which we cannot sensibly think of as repeatable in any significant way. Moreover, it is a past which it is the business of history to understand when recall and memory are superfluous to the task at hand.
R. G. Collingwood was a working historian and archaeologist for almost the whole of his life. Not afraid to get his hands dirty or to direct excavations himself, Collingwood, under the early guidance of his father W. G. Collingwood, and with the encouragement of his mentor at Oxford Francis Haverfield, became one of the leading historians of Roman Britain. He had long and often hard experience of excavation and he worked with many of the founding fathers of Romano-British archaeology. Collingwood always saw theory in close conjunction with practice. Whether it was an exercise in the history of ideas, such as the history of the idea of history which makes up Part I of The Idea of History, or a survey of the economic practices of ancient Rome, Collingwood’s operating principle was that neither can be grasped without an
appreciation of the idea or the practice involved. We know, too (a 30), that Collingwood’s account of history was shaped by insights gained from his own experience of tackling historical problems. as an historian in such works as Roman Britain (1923, with a second and largely rewritten edition following in 1932) and Roman Britain and the english settlements (1936, in which he wrote the first four books), Collingwood told the story of the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain from the point of view of the occupiers and the occupied. as an archaeologist in such works as The Archaeology of Roman Britain (1930) and in many articles published in the Transactions of the cumberland and westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological society and elsewhere, Collingwood published the results of his work on Hadrian’s Wall and a host of other archaeological subjects. Much of Collingwood’s historical work is devoted to explaining the material conditions of life in Roman Britain and the Roman Empire. Social and economic conditions, industries such as mining, population movements and statistics and land use, together with military history, are all fruitful subjects of Collingwood’s historical investigation.
The influence of Collingwood’s idea of history on his own way of writing history and on his own archaeological practice (and, indeed, on the writing and practices of others) is an important topic of discussion. Even so, the nature of Collingwood’s principles of history stands independently. Their origin, substance and validity are matters for philosophy. They deal with problems which it is outside the remit of either history or archaeology to solve. Throughout his life Collingwood worked on philosophy, history and archaeology. He was keen to investigate the links between them, but no one was interchangeable with the others. While archaeology gives history its empirical methodology it is not history itself, and while history gives philosophy the past as the subject matter of the philosophy of history it cannot on its own say what the past is, nor what makes history a valid form of experience in understanding it.
as a philosopher, then, Collingwood’s interest in history is with the conditions which make historical knowledge possible, but he also believed that history matters because a society that loses its sense of the past has also lost an essential element of its own identity. a human past is not wholly remote from the present, but
is experience which the present may wish to live down, live up to, deny or emulate. None of these responses would be possible if the past could not be reconstructed or could be thought of only on the model of natural science. Thus it is not surprising that Collingwood thinks of history as bearing the closest possible relation to life. Equally, history could not bear a close relation to life if historical knowledge was thought of solely as a body of fact or as data or information. To learn from history has sense only if the past is construed in terms of thought – whether it is the thought in the mind of the recruiting sergeant standing on the high street of an English town in late august 1914 or a Greek general contemplating the invasion of Sicily in the fifth century bc.
A not E AB out r EADI n G
The main texts on Collingwood which discuss his philosophy of history, including works specifically on his philosophy of history, are listed below. These will appear in the reading lists (under Further reading at the end of the book) as the author followed by page number, together with the main articles that have been written on each topic.
main texts
D’Oro, Giuseppina. (2002), collingwood and the Metaphysics of experience, London: Routledge.
Dray, William H. (1995), History as Re-enactment: R. G. collingwood’s Idea of History, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Helgeby, Stein. (2004), Action as History, The Historical Thought of R. G. collingwood, Exeter: Imprint academic.
Hinz, Michael. (1994), self-creation and History, collingwood and nietzsche on conceptual change, Lanham, MD: University Press of america.
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie. (2003), ‘How Good an Historian shall I Be?’ R. G. collingwood, The Historical Imagination and education, Exeter: Imprint academic.
Johnson, Peter. (1998), R. G. collingwood, Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
Kanichai, Cyriac. (1981), R. G. collingwood’s Philosophy of History, alwaye: Pontifical Institute of Theology and Philosophy.
Leach, Stephen. (2009), The Foundations of History, collingwood’s Analysis of Historical explanation, Exeter: Imprint academic.
Martin, Rex. (1977), Historical explanation, Re-enactment and Practical Inference, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mink, Louis. O. (1969), Mind, History and Dialectic, The Philosophy of R. G. collingwood, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Rubinoff, L. (1970), collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, A study in the Philosophy of Mind, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Russell, anthony F. (1984), Logic, Philosophy, and History, A study in the Philosophy of History Based on the work of R. G. collingwood, Lanham, MD: University Press of america.
Saari, Heikki. (1984), Re-enactment: A study in R. G. collingwood’s Philosophy of History, abo: abo akademi.
Skagestad, Peter. (1975), Making sense of History – the Philosophies of Popper and collingwood, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Van der Dussen, W. J. (1981), History as a science: The Philosophy of R.G. collingwood, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Books that include substantial discussions of Collingwood’s philosophy of history
Browning, Gary K. (2004), Rethinking R. G. collingwood, Philosophy, Politics and the Unity of Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dray, William. (1957), Laws and explanation in History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—(1980), Perspectives on History, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —(1989), On History and Philosophers of History, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Gallie, W. B. (1964), Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto & Windus.
Gardiner, Patrick. (1952), The nature of Historical explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, Leon J. (1976), Historical Knowing, austin: University of Texas Press.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. (1977), The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mink, Louis O. (1987), Historical Understanding, London: Cornell University Press.
Parker, Christopher. (2000), The english Idea of History from coleridge to collingwood, aldershot: ashgate.
Pompa, L. and Dray, W. H. (eds). (1981), substance and Form in History, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Van der Dussen, W. J. and Rubinoff, Lionel (eds). (1991), Objectivity, Method and Point of View, essays in the Philosophy of History, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Ch AP t E r on E Background to the text
text
Collingwood’s The Idea of History is not an uncomplicated text. It is not wholly the book which Collingwood intended to write on history and it consists of material written at different times and for different purposes. Thus to make it less complicated we need to establish what Collingwood’s intentions were and then get a clearer picture of the book’s content.
In 2012 we are in a much better position to understand Collingwood’s plans for the publication of his writings on history than would have been possible in 1946, and, indeed, for a number of years afterwards. What Collingwood actually intended is unambiguously laid out in letters he wrote to the Clarendon Press, Oxford in June and October 1939 (see Peter Johnson, The correspondence of R. G. collingwood, An Illustrated Guide, The R. G. Collingwood Society, 1998, Letters C2lxxv and C2lxxix). What Collingwood planned was a series of volumes divided into three categories: (1) Philosophical essays to consist of An essay on Philosophical Method (published in 1933) and An essay on Metaphysics, (published in 1940); (2) Philosophical Principles to consist of The Principles of Art (published in 1938) and The Principles of History (parts of which were published in The Idea
of History in 1946 and much of the remainder, together with other material in 1999), and (3) studies in the History of Ideas to consist of The Idea of nature (published in 1945) and The Idea of History (published in 1946).
From this plan we can see that, as originally intended, The Idea of History was to cover the history of ideas about history from the ancient world to the modern, roughly the material concerning historiography on which Collingwood had lectured in Oxford in 1936 (and other years) and which is included in Parts I to IV of the book as it was later published in its edited form. We can be sure that Collingwood’s design of his series was not accidental. For whereas his aim in the History of Ideas category is to give an account of the historical emergence of the idea of history (or of the idea of nature), together with their evolution and development, the goal of Philosophical Principles is quite different. Here his objective is to show what it is that makes art or history possible at all. Just as Collingwood’s aesthetics in The Principles of Art aims to establish the nature of art proper as opposed to a number of false approximations of it, so his Principles of History aims to reveal the autonomy of historical understanding by distinguishing it from ways of thinking that are unable to capture history’s true character. In other words, both works are intended to make us think about the inner rationale of the activities they examine.
Collingwood believed that to get to grips with history, both approaches were necessary. Mapping the conceptual boundaries of history is not an activity that could be conducted out of the blue. Equally, Collingwood interjects his history of the ideas of history with comments aimed at revealing the adequacy of any given idea. We may readily assume that this is why Collingwood planned the history and the principles to appear together in two separate volumes. What we should not assume, however, is that this gives us anything more than a hint about the philosophical issues at stake. Publishing the two volumes in tandem does give us a strong indication of the close relation philosophy bears with history, but it is only an arrangement of thought, not the thought itself.
Why, then, were Collingwood’s writings on history made public in the form of The Idea of History, a text which is something of a problem text, rather than as he would have wished? The words contained in The Idea of History are Collingwood’s own and the text is not deliberately ambiguous, but it is a composite
work, some parts of which are finished, others very much less so, including sections of The Principles of History itself. It is not that Collingwood did not try to complete The Principles of History. In 1939 during a recuperative voyage to the Dutch East Indies he wrote a little over one-third of it. But then work stopped. In fact, the answer is suggested in the date of Collingwood’s voyage and the reason for it. In 1939 Collingwood was suffering from a progressively debilitating illness. He knew that if he was to finish the work he had planned he would have to work fast, and he also knew that some projects would have to be sacrificed. By 1939 Collingwood was aware that the coming Second World War was inevitable. He needed to speak out, and so he formed the intention to write another work about principles, this time the fundamental principles of a liberal politics. This was The new Leviathan (published in 1942). It occupied Collingwood up until the last year of his life and we have good reason for thinking that this is the book which The Principles of History was set aside to complete. after Collingwood died early in 1943 it was felt that the writings on nature and history made the best case for publication. Whereas the nature manuscript was self-contained the material on history was diverse, and the job of editing it and preparing it for publication was given to a student and friend of Collingwood’s, T. M. Knox. It was Knox, then, who had the task of bringing The Idea of History, as it was to be called, into the world. This he did in 1946. Knox selected manuscript material for publication by reference: first, to how finished he thought it was, and second, to the availability of the content elsewhere in Collingwood’s published writing, especially in his An Autobiography which had been published in 1939.
Knox’s Preface to the 1946 edition, together with Jan van der Dussen’s invaluable Editor’s Introduction to his 1993 revised edition of The Idea of History, tell us a great deal about how the volume, was composed. Knox’s first decision was to publish Collingwood’s writings on history in one volume rather than two as had been originally planned. His second was to divide the volume into two sections, one on historiography (Parts I to IV), and the other on the philosophical principles of history (Part V). While Collingwood had revised a small part of the first section in 1940, it was more or less complete, being the main body of the lectures on the subject he gave in 1936. Part V was a very different matter, however. To some degree following Collingwood’s own
title, Knox called Part V, Epilegomena. Here Knox decided to include material from Collingwood’s 1936 Lectures concerning the nature of historical knowledge, together with material from Chapters 1 and 4 of the unfinished manuscript of The Principles of History. To this Knox added two published items, The Historical Imagination, Collingwood’s Inaugural Lecture which had been published in 1935, and Human nature and Human History, a lecture to the British academy which had been published in 1936.
Summing this up, the Epilegomena section consists of work produced between 1935 and 1939, some of which was published, some not. Some of this takes the form of essays and lectures, some manuscript material from the unfinished The Principles of History. The division of Part V into seven subsections was also Knox’s, as was the ordering of the material it contained. Thus, we have the Epilegomena as Knox entitled and presented it.
1 Human nature and Human History 1936
2 The Historical Imagination 1935
3 ‘Historical Evidence’, Chapter 1 of the unfinished The Principles of History 1939
4 ‘History as the Re-enactment of Past Experience’ 1936 Lectures
5 ‘The Subject-matter of History’ 1936 Lectures
6 ‘History and Freedom’, part of Chapter 4 of The Principles of History 1939
7 ‘Progress as Created by Historical Thinking’ 1936 Lectures
Research on Collingwood’s manuscripts has revealed grounds for disagreement with Knox’s procedures, but I think that two points need to be made here. First, there is a strong sense in which Collingwood’s philosophical insights about the nature of history rise above their edited format. The doctrines central to Collingwood’s account of history emerge clearly from The Idea of History, and while they often provoke a considerable degree of argument, including, sometimes, opposition, their meaning is, more often than not, quite transparent. This is not to say that some topics, re-enactment, for example, are always treated exhaustively, nor is it to deny that fringe topics, such as the relation
between history and biography, are given more attention outside The Idea of History than in it. Second, there is an equally strong sense in which debates about the adequacy of Knox’s edition are of limited interest because since the publication in 1999 of The Principles of History together with the incorporation of much relevant additional material, there is little of Collingwood’s writing on history that is now outside the public domain. Collingwood’s writings on history, if not in the form he intended, are now completely open to discussion and debate.
Context
While Herodotus is considered to be the father of history, we can reasonably think of Collingwood as the originator of modern philosophical accounts of history. Yet, Collingwood was resistant to modern analytical philosophy, and so his account of the emergence of history as an autonomous form of understanding is largely conducted independently. What interests Collingwood is not history consisting of statements which can be tested against scientific criteria, but the idea of history itself. Even so, the thought that historians are in some sense concerned with ascertainable fact is not easily set aside. So when Collingwood turns to the history of ideas of history he is careful to acknowledge what is true as well as what is false in theories of history which take verifiability as their model.
To express this point more generally. The best method for setting The Idea of History in context is to turn to the history of ideas of history in the first four parts of the book. This discussion of Graeco-Roman historiography, the rise of Christian ideas of history, of the approach of scientific history and of scientific history itself is important to philosophers as well as to historians of ideas, since in these sections Collingwood does more than just identify the salient characteristics of the thinking about history in each period. He plots the development of the idea of history as an autonomous discipline of thought, and so he charts lines of progress and regression, startlingly new insights which find themselves repeated in later ways of thinking, as well as relapses and setbacks in which history finds itself embraced by understandings which are not its own. In other words, there is a significant sense in
which Collingwood wants his readers to understand his survey as leading to the completion of his own point of view. Given that Collingwood’s history of the ideas of history was originally given as lectures, this is not, perhaps, surprising. Not only does Collingwood’s thinking about historiography parallel and also inform his investigations into the nature of history, we do not go far wrong in concluding that he intended that it should.
Once Collingwood’s general approach has been grasped, we can see how it works in individual cases. Thus, in Collingwood’s hands (IH 17–20), the historical writings of Herodotus do not simply chronicle his own age. They contain in embryonic form some of the elements of autonomy that the modern understanding of history requires. an ancient historian’s view of evidence as the testimony of eyewitnesses for the occurrence of a particular event – say, the death of an individual in battle – is an advance because it allows the eyewitness account to be tested, thus permitting the historian to move from the belief that the death occurred to the knowledge that it has. But, equally, this ancient understanding of evidence is limited to what testimony can provide and this in turn limits the scope of history. Collingwood thought that the interrogation of eyewitness accounts was a development of the first importance in the emergence of the idea of history. Limited in range, it provided nevertheless an essential feature of scientific history as Collingwood understands it, namely a critical method for the establishment of fact.
We see a similar technique in Collingwood’s treatment of the English Renaissance historian and philosopher Francis Bacon (IH 58–60). What Bacon achieved was the identification of the past as past, as an area of human experience worth studying for its own sake rather than as the manifestation of a divine plan or as the function of the divine will. But Bacon limited history by restricting it to what could be recovered by memory. Thus, in addition to the project of understanding the past as past, what was needed was a critical method for carrying this out. To restrict history to the remembered past is to look at the past with one eye closed. Thus, while it is the past as past which the historian is interested in reconstructing, systematic rules and procedures are needed to achieve this when memory is absent.
In Collingwood’s account the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline of thought is neither smooth nor settled.
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Sunday, September 2. Paris.
The driver assigned to take me to the train, which left from the next village this morning, lost his way, and we reached the station just as the engine was sounding the Galli-Curci note that means All Aboard. There was no time to buy a ticket, and you can’t pay a cash fare on a train in France. But the conductor, or whatever you call him here, said I could get a ticket at the destination, Paris; in fact, I must get a ticket or spend the rest of my unnatural life wandering about the station.
I found a seat in a compartment in which were a young American officer, beginning his forty-eight hours’ leave, and a young French lady who looked as if she had been in Paris before. The young officer and I broke into conversation at once. The young lady didn’t join in till we had gone nearly twenty kilomet’s.
Captain Jones, which isn’t his name, called attention to the signs on the window warning MM. Les Voyageurs to keep their anatomies indoors. The signs were in three languages. “Ne pas Pencher au Dehors,” said the French. The English was “Danger to Lean Outside.” And the Wop: “Non Sporgere”—very brief. It was evident that a fourth variation of the warning had been torn off, and it didn’t require a William Burns to figure out in what language it had been written.
“If there were a boche on this train,” said Captain Jones, “he could lean his head off without hurting any one’s feelings.”
“Languages are funny,” continued the captain sagely. “The French usually need more words than we do to express the same thought. I believe that explains why they talk so fast—they’ve got so much more to say.”
I inquired whether he knew French.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve been over here so long that I can even tell the money apart.”
The dining-car conductor came in to ask whether we wanted the first or second “série” luncheon. You must reserve your seat at table
on trains here or you can’t eat. We decided on the second, and so did our charming compartment mate. Captain Jones, supposing she could not understand English, said: “Shall you take her to lunch or shall I?”
I was about to be magnanimous when she remarked, with a scornful glance at the captain: “I shall myself take me to lunch if monsieur has no objection.”
The cap was temporarily groggy, but showed wonderful recuperative powers and in five minutes convinced her that he would toss himself into the Seine if she refused to eat with us. She accepted, after some stalling that convinced me she had been cordially inclined all the while.
General polite conversation ensued, and soon came the inevitable French question: How many American soldiers were there in France? I have heard it asked a million times, and I have heard a million different answers. The captain gave the truthful reply: “I don’t know.”
“I shall myself take me to lunch if monsieur has no objections”
“This war,” he said, “should be called the War of Rumors. The war will be over by Christmas. The war won’t be over for ten years. The boche is starving. The Allies are getting fat. The boche has plenty to eat. The Allies are dying of hunger. Our last transport fleet sank five subs. Our last transport fleet was sunk by a whole flotilla of subs. Montenegro’s going to make a separate peace with Bosnia. There is talk of peace negotiations between Hungary and Indiana. Ireland, Brazil and Oklahoma are going to challenge the world. They’re going to move the entire war to the Balkans and charge admission. The Kaiser’s dying of whooping cough. You can learn anything you want to or don’t want to know. Why”—this to me —“don’t you fellas print the truth?”
“And where,” I asked him, “would you advise us to go and get it?”
“The same place I got it,” said the captain.
“And what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
We adjourned to the diner. A sign there said: “Non Fumeurs.” The captain pointed to it.
“That’s brief enough,” he said. “That’s once when the French is concise. But you ought to see the Chinese for that. I was in a town near the British front recently where some Chinese laborers are encamped. In the station waiting-room, it says: ‘No Smoking’ in French, English, Russian and Italian. The Russian is something like ‘Do notski smokevitch,’ and the Italian is ‘Non Smokore’. Recently they have added a Chinese version, and it’s longer than the Bible. A moderate smoker could disobey the rules forty times before he got through the first chapter and found out what they were driving at.”
Be that as it may, I have observed that everybody in France smokes whenever and wherever he or she desires, regardless of signs. We did now, and so did our guest, while waiting for the first course, which was black bread baked in a brickyard.
“I would love to go to America,” said mademoiselle.
“You wouldn’t care for it,” replied the captain promptly. “It’s too wild.”
“How is it wild?”
“Every way: manners, habits, morals. The majority of the people, of course, are Indians, and you just can’t make them behave.”
She asked whether either of us had ever been in New York. The captain said he’d passed through there once on the way to Coney Island. She wanted to know if New York was bigger than Paris. “It’s bigger than France,” said Captain Jones.
Monsieur was trying to make a game of her.
“Well, anyway,” said the captain, “you could lose France in Texas.”
What was Texas?
“Texas,” said the captain, “is the place they send soldiers when they’ve been bad. It’s way out west, near Chicago.”
The lady had heard of Chicago.
“This gentleman works there,” said the captain. “He’s part Indian, but he was educated at Carlisle and is somewhat civilized. He gets wild only on occasions.”
The lady regarded me rather scaredly.
“He lives on the plains outside the city,” continued the captain, “and rides to his work and back on a zebra. Practically all the suburban savages have zebras, and the Chicago traffic police have a fierce time handling them during their owners’ working hours. They run wild around the streets and in the department stores, and snap at women, especially brunettes.”
We had attained the potato course. The French positively will not serve potatoes as other than a separate course. I was about to help myself to a generous portion when the captain cried: “Here! Better leave those things alone. You know what they do to you.”
I told him I didn’t believe two or three would hurt, and proceeded to take three.
“When a half Indian eats potatoes,” said the captain, “he usually forgets himself and runs amuck.”
Our guest probably didn’t know what a muck was, but it had an unpleasant sound, and the look she gave me was neither friendly nor trusting.
“The greatest difference between France and America,” continued Captain Jones, “is in the people. In America a man ordinarily takes the initiative in striking up an acquaintance with a woman. He has to speak to her before she’ll speak to him. This would never do in France, where the men are too shy. Then there’s a difference in the way men treat their wives and horses. Americans use whips instead of clubs. And Americans have funny ideas about their homes. Private bedrooms and playrooms are provided for their pets—zebras, lizards and wild cats—and the little fellows are given
to understand that they must remain in them and not run all over the house, like one of your cows.”
He paused to ask me how the potatoes were acting. I said it was too soon to tell, but I felt a little dizzy in the head. He suggested it were better to go back to our compartment, where there were less things to throw in the event of my reaching the throwing stage.
“On the other hand,” I said, “if I am deprived of knives, forks and plates, I will pick on human beings, and I usually aim out the windows.”
But he said he was sick of the atmosphere in the diner. We asked for l’addition and argued over who should pay it. I won, and when he had been given his change we returned to our own car, where mademoiselle demonstrated her fear of my expected outbreak by going to sleep.
We turned our attention to the scenery, the most striking feature of which was the abundance of boche prisoners at work in the fields.
“Lucky stiffs!” said the captain. “The war is over for them if they can just manage not to escape, and I guess there’s no difficulty about that. Better food than the soldiers, a soft job, and a bed to sleep in. And wages besides. Every private in the Fritz army would surrender if the officers hadn’t given them a lot of bunk about the way German prisoners are treated. They make them believe we cut off their feet and ears and give them one peanut and a glass of water every two weeks.”
Paris hove into view, and we quarreled about the girl. The fair thing, we decided, would be to turn over her and her baggage to a porter and wish her many happy returns of the day. We were spared this painful duty, however, for when she awoke she treated both of us as strangers. And the gentleman who attended to her baggage was not a porter, but a French aviator, waiting on the station platform for that very purpose.
“She’ll tell him,” guessed the captain, “that an American soldier and half Indian tried to flirt with her on the train, but she froze them out.”
Captain Jones stuck with me till my exit ticket was procured, a chore that ate up over an hour. Then we climbed into a dreadnought and came to this hotel, where I sat right down and versified as follows:
TO AN AMERICAN SOLDIER
If you don’t like the nickname Sammy, If it’s not all a nickname should be, You can pick out Pat or Mike, Whatever name you like— It won’t make no difference to me.
Want a Thomas or Harry or Dick name? Dost prefer to be called Joe or Lou? You’ve a right to your choice of a nickname; Oh, Mr. Yank, it’s up to you.
MY ADVENTURES AT THE BRITISH FRONT
Monday, September 3. Paris.
I this morning’s mail was a letter from Somewhere in London, replying favorably to my request to go to the British front. I was directed to take the letter to the assistant provost marshal, who would slip me a pass and inform me as to the details of the trip.
At the A. P. M.’s I was given the pass and with it “an undertaking to be signed by all intending visitors to the front.” There are ten rules in the undertaking, and some of them are going to be hard to obey. For example:
“I understand that it is impossible to arrange for me to see relatives serving with the fighting forces.”
“I will not visit the enemy front during the present war.”
But No. 6 is the tough one:
“In no circumstances will I deliver a political or electioneering speech to troops.”
I must pray for strength to resist natural impulses along this line.
Wednesday morning, said the A. P M., would be our starting time. And he told us when and where to take the train—“us” because I am to be accompanied by a regular correspondent, one who carries a cane and everything.
Mr Gibbons, the regular correspondent, informs me I must wear a uniform, and to-morrow morning I am to try on his extra one, which he has kindly offered.
Another chore scheduled for to-morrow is the squaring of myself with the boss of the French Maison de la Presse, who invited me to visit the devastated territory Thursday and Friday. The invitation was accepted, but the British and French dates conflict, and I would rather see one real, live front than any number of broken-down barns and boched trees.
Tuesday, September 4. Paris.
I reported, after the French idea of breakfast, at the Maison de la Presse. This is situate on the fourth floor of a building equipped with an elevator that proves the fallacy of the proverb “What goes up must come down.” You can dimly see it at the top of the shaft, and no amount of button pushing or rope pulling budges it.
During the long climb I rehearsed the speech of apology and condolence framed last night, and wondered whether monsieur would be game and try to smile or break down completely or fly into a rage. He was game, and he not only tried to smile, but succeeded. And his smile was in perfect simulation of relief. These French are wonderful actors.
I returned thence to Mr. Gibbons’ room for my fitting. His extra uniform consisted of a British officer’s coat and riding breeches, puttees and shoes. Cap and khaki shirt I had to go out and purchase. The store I first selected was a gyp joint and wanted twenty-seven francs for a cap. I went to another store and got exactly the same thing for twenty-six. A careful shopper can save a lot of money in Paris.
Provided with cap and shirt, the latter costing a franc less than the former, I went to a secluded spot and tried on the outfit, Mr. Gibbons assisting. We managed the puttees in thirty-five minutes. It
is said that a man working alone can don them in an hour, provided he is experienced.
“You look,” Mr Gibbons remarked when I was fully dressed, “as if you had been poured into it.”
But I felt as if I hadn’t said “when” quite soon enough. Mr. Gibbons and I differ in two important particulars—knee joints—and though I tried to seem perfectly comfortable, my knees were fairly groaning to be free of the breeches and out in the open fields.
“Wear it the rest of the day and get used to it,” advised Mr. Gibbons.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to rumple it all up. I want to keep it neat for to-morrow.” And against his protest I tore myself out and resumed my humble Chicago garb.
It’s no wonder regular correspondents and British officers are obliged to wear canes. The wonder is that they don’t use crutches.
We leave at nine to-morrow morning. This means that myself and puttees will have to get up at four.
Wednesday, September 5. With the British.
The major has a very good sense of the fitness of things. The room where I’m writing, by candlelight, is the best guest room in our château and was once occupied by the queen.
The rules of the household call for the dousing of down-stairs glims at eleven o’clock. After that you may either remain down there in total darkness or come up here and bask in the brilliant rays of a candle. You should, I presume, be sleepy enough to go right to bed, but you’re afraid you might forget something if you put off the day’s record till to-morrow.
I overslept myself, as they say, and had to get Mr. Gibbons to help with the puttees. The lower part of the breeches, I found, could
be loosened just enough to make the knee area inhabitable.
“You look as if you had been poured into it”
We skipped breakfast and reached the station in a taxi without hitting anything. It was fifteen minutes before train time, but there wasn’t a vacant seat in the train. A few of the seats were occupied by poilus, and the rest by poilus’ parcels and newspapers. A Frenchman always gets to a nine o’clock train by seven-thirty. He picks one seat for himself and one or two on each side of him for his impedimenta. This usually insures him privacy and plenty of room, for it is considered an overt act even to pick up a magazine and sit in its place. Mr. Gibbons and I walked from one end of the train to the other and half-way back again without any one’s taking a hint. We climbed into a carriage just as she started to move. There were six seats and three occupants. We inquired whether all the seats were reserved, and were given to understand that they were, the owners of three having gone to a mythical dining-car.
We went into the aisle and found standing room among the Australians and Canadians returning from their leave. One of the former, a young, red-headed, scrappy-looking captain, smiled sympathetically and broke open a conversation. I was glad of it, for it gave me an opportunity of further study of the language. I am a glutton for languages, and the whole day has been a feast. We have listened to six different kinds—Australian, Canadian, British, French, Chinese and Harvard. I have acquired an almost perfect understanding of British, Australian and Canadian, which are somewhat similar, and of Harvard, which I studied a little back home. French and Chinese I find more difficult, and I doubt that any one could master either inside of a month or so.
The red-headed captain remarked on the crowded condition of the trine That is Australian as well as British for train. The Canadian is like our word, and the French is spelled the same, but is pronounced as if a goat were saying it. Lack of space prevents the publication of the Chinese term.
One of the captain’s best pals, he told us, had just been severely wounded. He was a gime one, though even smaller than the captain. The captain recalled one night when he, the pal, took prisoner a boche lieutenant who stood over six feet. Fritz was asked whether he spoke English. He shook his head. He was asked whether he
spoke French. He lost his temper and, in English, called the entire continent of Australia a bad name. The captain’s little pal then marched him off to the proper authority, to be questioned in English. On the way the captain’s little pal made him take off his helmet and give it to him. This was as punishment for what Fritz had said about Australia.
Before the proper authority Fritz was as sweet-tempered as a bloody bear. This puzzled the proper authority, for making a boche prisoner is doing him a big favor.
“What iles you?” asked the authority when Fritz had refused to reply to any of a dozen questions. “You ine’t the first bloody boche officer we’ve tiken.”
Then Fritz bared his grievance. He didn’t mind, he said, being a prisoner. The size of his captor was the thing that galled. “And for Gott’s sake,” he added, “make him give back my helmet.”
The proper authority turned to the captain’s little pal. “He’s your prisoner,” he said. “What do you want to do with the helmet?”
“Keep it, sir,” said the captain’s little pal.
And it will be used back in Australia some day to illustrate the story, which by that time will doubtless have more trimmings.
“But how about Fritz?” I asked. “When he gets home and tells the same story, he’ll have nothing with which to prove it.”
“He ine’t agoin’ to tell the sime story.”
We were welcomed at our destination by a captain, another regular correspondent, and two good English cars. The captain said he was expecting another guest on this train, a Harvard professor on research work bent.
“I have no idea what he looks like,” said the captain.
“I have,” said Mr Gibbons and I in concert, but it went over the top.
The professor appeared at length, and we were all whisked some thirty kilometers to a luncheon worth having. Afterward we
were taken to the Chinese camp. Chinatown, we’ll call it, is where the Chink laborers are mobilized when they first arrive and kept until their various specialties are discovered. Then each is assigned to the job he can do best. I was told I mustn’t mention the number of Chinamen now in France, but I can say, in their own language, it’s a biggee lottee.
They wear a uniform that consists of blue overalls, a blue coat, and no shirt whatever, which, I think, is bad advertising for their national trade. They brought shirts with them, it seems, but are more comfy without.
The minimum wage is three francs a day. Two-thirds of what they earn is paid them here, the other third given to their families in China. The system of hiring is unique. No names are used, probably because most Chinks have Sam Lee as a monniker, and the paymaster would get all mixed up with an army of Sam Lees. They are numbered and their finger prints are taken by an agent in China. He sends these identification marks to the camp here, and when the Chinks arrive they are checked up by a finger-print expert from Scotland Yard. This gentleman said there had been several cases where the Chinaman landing here was a ringer, some “friend” back home having signed up and then coaxed the ringer to come in his place, believing, apparently, that the plot would not be detected and that his profit would be the one-third share of the wage that is paid in China. The ringer’s family would be done out of its pittance, but that, of course, would make no difference to the ringer’s friend. The finger-print system serves not only to prevent the success of cute little schemes like that, but also to amuse the Chinks, who are as proud of their prints as if they had designed them.
We went into the general store, which is conducted by a Britisher The Chinese had just had a pay-day and were wild to spend. One of them said he wanted a razor. The proprietor produced one in a case, and the Chink handed over his money without even looking at the tool. Another wanted a hat. The prop. gave him a straw with a band that was all colors of the rainbow. The Chinaman paid for it and took it away without troubling to see whether it fitted.
A block or so from the store we ran across two Chinks who had been naughty. Each was in a stock, a pasteboard affair on which was inscribed, in Chinese, the nature of his offense. One of them had been guilty of drinking water out of a fire bucket. The other had drunk something else out of a bottle—drunk too much of it, in fact. They looked utterly wretched, and our guide told us the punishment was the most severe that could be given: that a Chinaman’s pride was his most vulnerable spot.
The gent who had quenched his thirst from the fire bucket was sentenced to wear his stock a whole day. He of the stew was on the last lap of a week’s term.
We talked with one of the Lee family through an interpreter. We asked him if he knew that the United States was in the war against Germany. He replied, No, but he had heard that France was.
Just before we left the settlement a British plane flew over it. A Chink who was walking with us evidently mistook it for a Hun machine, for he looked up and said: “Bloody boche!”
From Chinatown we were driven to the American Visitors’ Château, where gentlemen and correspondents from the United States are entertained. It’s a real château, with a moat and everything. The major is our host. The major has seen most of his service in India and China.
He said he was glad to meet us, which I doubt. The new arrivals, Mr. Gibbons, the Harvard professor and myself, were shown our rooms and informed that dinner would occur at eight o’clock. Before dinner we were plied with cocktails made by our friend, the captain. The ingredients, I believe, were ether, arsenic and carbolic acid in quantities not quite sufficient to cause death.
Eleven of us gathered around the festal board. There were the major and his aids, three British captains, one with a monocle. There was the Harvard professor, and the head of a certain American philanthropical organization, and his secretary And then there were us, me and Mr. Gibbons and Mr. O’Flaherty and Mr. Somner, upstarts in the so-called journalistic world.
The dinner was over the eighteen-course course, the majority of the courses being liquid. I wanted to smoke between the fish and the sherry, but Mr. O’Flaherty whispered to me that it wasn’t done till the port had been served.
Mention was made of the Chinese camp, and there ensued a linguistic battle between the major and the Harvard professor. The latter explained the theory of the Chinese language. He made it as clear as mud. In the Chinese language, he said, every letter was a word, and the basis of every word was a picture. For example, if you wanted to say “my brother,” you drew a picture of your brother in your mind and then expressed it in a word, such as woof or whang. If you wanted a cigar, you thought of smoke and said “puff” or “blow,” but you said it in Chinese.
Mr. Gibbons broke up the battle of China by asking the major whether I might not be allowed to accompany him and Mr. O’Flaherty and one of the captains on their perilous venture to-morrow night. They are going to spend the night in a Canadian first-line trench.
“I’m sorry,” said the major, “but the arrangement has been made for only three.”
I choked back tears of disappointment.
The major has wished on me for to-morrow a trip through the reconquered territory. My companions are to be the captain with the monocle, the Harvard professor, the philanthropist, and the philanthropist’s secretary. We are to start off at eight o’clock. Perhaps I can manage to oversleep.
Thursday, September 6. With the British.
I did manage it, and the car had left when I got down-stairs. Mr. Gibbons and Mr. O’Flaherty were still here, and the three of us made another effort to get me invited to the party to-night. The major wouldn’t fall for it.
Mr Gibbons and Mr O’Flaherty motored to an artillery school, the understanding being that they were to be met at six this evening by one of our captains and taken to the trench. I was left here alone with the major.
We lunched together, and he called my attention to the mural decorations in the dining-room. It’s a rural mural, and in the foreground a young lady is milking a cow. She is twice as big as the cow and is seated in the longitude of the cow’s head. She reaches her objective with arms that would make Jess Willard jealous. In another area a lamb is conversing with its father and a couple of squirrels which are larger than either lamb or parent. In the lower right-hand corner is an ox with its tongue in a tin can, and the can is labeled Ox Tongue for fear some one wouldn’t see the point. Other figures in the pictures are dogs, foxes and chickens of remarkable size and hue.
“We had a French painter here a few days ago,” said the major. “I purposely seated him where he could look at this picture. He took one look, then asked me to change his seat.”
The major inquired whether I had noticed the picture of the château which decorates the doors of our automobiles.
“When you go out to-morrow,” he said, “you’ll observe that none of the army cars is without its symbol. An artillery car has its picture of a gun. Then there are different symbols for the different divisions. I saw one the other day with three interrogation marks painted on it. I inquired what they meant and was told the car belonged to the Watts division. Do you see why?”
I admitted that I did.
“Well, I didn’t,” said the major, “not till it was explained. It’s rather stupid, I think.”
This afternoon an American captain, anonymous of course, called on us. He is stopping at G. H. Q., which is short for General Headquarters, his job being to study the British strategic methods. He and the major discussed the differences between Americans and Englishmen.
“The chief difference is in temperature,” said the captain. “You fellows are about as warm as a glacier. In America I go up to a man and say: ‘My name is Captain So-an-So.’ He replies: ‘Mine is Colonel Such-and-Such.’ Then we shake hands and talk. But if I go to an Englishman and say: ‘My name is Captain So-and-So,’ he says: ‘Oh!’ So I’m embarrassed to death and can’t talk.”
“’Strawnary!” said the major.
At tea time a courier brought us the tidings that there’d been an air raid last Sunday at a certain hospital base.
“The boche always does his dirty work on Sunday,” remarked the American captain. “It’s queer, too, because that’s the day that’s supposed to be kept holy, and I don’t see how the Kaiser squares himself with his friend Gott.”
I laughed, but the major managed to remain calm.
The American captain departed after tea, and the major and I sat and bored each other till the Harvard professor and his illustrious companions returned. They told me I missed a very interesting trip. That’s the kind of trip one usually misses.
At dinner we resumed our enlightening discussion of Chinese, but it was interrupted when the major was called to the telephone. The message was from the captain who was supposed to meet Mr. Gibbons and Mr. O’Flaherty and take them to the trenches to spend the night. The captain reported that his machine had broken down with magneto trouble and he’d been unable to keep his appointment. He requested that the major have Mr. Gibbons and Mr. O’Flaherty located and brought home.
This was done. The disappointed correspondents blew in shortly before closing time and confided to me their suspicion that the trouble with the captain’s machine had not been magneto, but (the censor cut out a good line here).
To-morrow we are to be shown the main British training school and the hospital bases.
Friday,
September
7. With the British.
We left the château at nine and reached the training camp an hour later.
We saw a squad of ineligibles drilling, boys under military age who had run away from home to get into the Big Game. Their parents had informed the authorities of their ineligibility, and the authorities had refused to enroll them. The boys had refused to go back home, and the arrangement is that they are to remain here and drill till they are old enough to fight. Some of them are as much as three years shy of the limit.
The drill is made as entertaining as possible. The instructor uses a variation of our “Simon says: ‘Thumbs up’.” “O’Grady” sits in for Simon. For example, the instructor says: “O’Grady says: ‘Right dress.’ Left dress.” The youth who “left dresses” without O’Grady’s say-so is sent to the awkward squad in disgrace.
Out of a bunch of approximately two hundred only two went through the drill perfectly. The other one hundred and ninety-eight underestimated the importance of O’Grady and sheepishly stepped out of line. The two perfectos looked as pleased as peacocks.
We saw a bayonet drill with a tutor as vivacious and linguistically original as a football coach, and were then taken to the bombthrowing school. The tutor here was as deserving of sympathy as a Belgian. A bomb explodes five seconds after you press the button. Many of the pupils press the button, then get scared, drop the bomb and run. The instructor has to pick up the bomb and throw it away before it explodes and messes up his anatomy. And there’s no time to stop and figure in what direction you’re going to throw.
The Maoris were our next entertainers. The Maoris are colored gemmen from New Zealand. They were being taught how to capture a trench. Before they left their own dugout they sang a battle hymn that would make an American dance and scare a German to death. They went through their maneuvers with an incredible amount of pep and acted as if they could hardly wait to get into real action against
the boche. Personally, I would have conscientious objections to fighting a Maori.
Then we were shown a gas-mask dress rehearsal. A British gas mask has a sweet scent, like a hospital. You can live in one, they say, for twenty-four hours, no matter what sort of poison the lovely Huns are spraying at you. We all tried them on and remarked on their efficacy, though we knew nothing about it.
We had lunch and were told we might make a tour of inspection of the hospitals in which the wounded lay. I balked at this and, instead, called on a Neenah, Wisconsin, doctor from whose knee had been extracted a sizable piece of shrapnel, the gift of last Sunday’s bomb dropper. This doctor has been over but three weeks, and the ship that brought him came within a yard of stopping a torpedo. Neither war nor Wisconsin has any terrors left for him.
To-morrow we are to be taken right up to the front, dressed in helmets, gas masks, and everything.
Saturday, September 8. With the British.
Two machine loads, containing us and our helmets, masks, and lunch baskets, got away to an early start and headed for the Back of the Front. In one car were the Captain with the Monocle, the Harvard prof., and the American philanthropist. The baggage, the philanthropist’s secretary, and I occupied the other. The secretary talked incessantly and in reverent tones of his master, whom he called The Doctor. One would have almost believed he considered me violently opposed to The Doctor (which I wasn’t, till later in the day) and was trying to win me over to his side with eulogistic oratory.
The first half of our journey was covered at the usual terrifying rate of speed. The last half was a snail’s crawl which grew slower and slower as we neared our objective. Countless troops, afoot and in motors, hundreds of ammunition and supply trucks, and an incredible number of businesslike and apparently new guns, these
