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![rigour of his logic combined to provide him with that position of
authority which directed the thinking of his followers throughout the
world long after his death in 1832. Basing his conclusions on his own
reconstructions of the strange new mammalian fossils from the Paris
basin, this ‘antiquary of a new order’ concluded from the obvious
evidence, both geological and palaeontological, that the earth had
been visited by a succession of sudden and cataclysmic revolutions.
Cuvier noted, ‘Thus we have . . . a series of epochs . . . anterior to the
present time, and of which the successive steps may be ascertained
with perfect certainty. . . These epochs form so many Wxed points,
answering as rules for directing our enquiries respecting the ancient
chronology of the earth’ (Cuvier 1817: 8). And each of these epochs,
these ‘thousands of ages’ marching inevitably to the present, bore
some characteristic segment of the ‘thousands of animals’ that a
succession of revolutions had destroyed. The serious and adventur-
ous eVorts of numbers of collectors, following in the path that Cuvier
had opened, Wlled in the outlines of the palaeontological past in
much the same way and with much the same passion and spirit
with which the followers of Linnaeus earlier had expanded beyond
prior conception the borders of the living universe. The zeal to
observe and to record combined with the tedium surrounding the
old controversies to produce a new spirit in geology. ‘A new school at
last arose,’ wrote the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell, himself one
of its most distinguished members:
We professed the strictest neutrality. . . and [the members] resolved dili-
gently to devote their labours to observation . . . Speculative views were
discountenanced . . . To multiply and record observation, and patiently to
await the result at some future period, was the object proposed by them; and
it was their favourite maxim that the time was not yet come for a general
system of geology, but that all must be content for many years to be
exclusively engaged in furnishing materials for future generalizations. By
acting up to these principles with consistency, they in a few years disarmed
all prejudice, and rescued the science from the imputation of being danger-
ous, or at best but a visionary pursuit. (Lyell 1855: 58–9)
Nevertheless, the very weight of the evidence carved from the super-
imposed strata of the earth’s crust produced a generally accepted
theory of its past.
Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 17](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-33-2048.jpg)
![Still a young man with his Principles of Geology only recently
published, Lyell had visited the Belgian caves in which Schmerling
was breaking both his body and heart; but, puzzled over the evidence,
he could only sympathize with the diYculty of the problem. To
Gideon Mantell, he wrote (Lyell 1881: i. 401–2) in 1833:
I saw. . . at Liège the collection of Dr. Schmerling, who in three years has, by
his own exertions . . . cleared out some twenty caves untouched by any
previous searcher, and has Wlled a truly splendid museum. He numbers
already thrice the number of fossil cavern mammalia known when Buckland
wrote his ‘Idola specus’. . . But envy him not—you can imagine what he feels
at being far from a metropolis which can aVord him sympathy; and having
not one congenial soul at Liège, and none who take any interest in his
discoveries save the priests—and what kind they take you may guess more
especially as he has found human remains in breccia, embedded with extinct
species, under circumstances far more diYcult to get over than I have previously
heard of. (my italics)
The evidence from Kent’s Hole was common knowledge, as were the
discoveries from the French caves, and their discoverers’ interpretations.
Nor did the discoveries from the Somme Valley (Boucher de
Perthes 1847; 1857) go unnoticed or unchampioned. Boucher de
Perthes engaged in an extensive correspondence with geologists and
antiquarians throughout Europe; and he took every available oppor-
tunity to send copies of his Antiquités celtiques et antediluviennes to
anyone to whom it might have the slightest interest.7 Darwin wrote
to Lyell (Darwin 1887: iii. 15) in 1863 that he ‘had looked at his
[Boucher de Perthes’s] book many years ago, and am ashamed to
think that I concluded the whole was rubbish!’ Boucher de Perthes
had sent the British Archaeological Association ‘a quantity of Celtic
antiquities in Xint discovered by him in the environs of Abbeville . . .
some of which he assigns to an antediluvian date’. The Association
was to have discussed these discoveries, but apparently never did
7 Thus a letter dated 9 December 1857, from Robert Fitch to Ackerman, the
secretary of the Society of Antiquaries: ‘I have received a letter from my friend
Mr. C. Roach Smith, informing me that M. Boucher de Perthes, was about sending
some copies of two antiquarian works to your care, one of which he had kindly
presented to the Norfolk & Norwich Archaeological Society’ (Society of Antiquaries
Correspondence).
Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 23](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-39-2048.jpg)
![(Literary Gazette 1849). Roach-Smith, a remarkable English archae-
ologist and one of the more ardent of Boucher de Perthes’s sup-
porters in England wrote to him on 11 April 1850 (Boucher de Perthes
Correspondence) that ‘Dr. Gideon Mantell, one of our Wrst geologists,
sent to me yesterday to borrow your Antiquités Celtiques to lecture on
or refer to in one of his lectures’; and on 26 November 1851, he wrote
‘I expect from Dr. Hume of Liverpool a copy of his paper in which he
comments favourably on your ‘‘Antiquités Celtiques’’. . . Dr. Hume
has asked me if I thought you would like to be a member of the
Lancashire and Cheshire Historical Society. I have written in the
aYrmative’ (ibid.).8 Another English archaeologist, James Yates,
wrote on 12 February 1850 (ibid.), ‘I have not seen the Dean of
Westminster [Buckland] since I sent him your Antiquités Celtiques.’
Thus, whatever attitudes particular individuals may have entertained
with reference to the work of Boucher de Perthes, both man and his
work were known and discussed in England. As was the case with
Kent’s Hole, however, it was the ‘amateurs’ and the archaeologists
who tended to support him and the ‘professionals’ and geologists
who opposed him.
It was not therefore, that these important data were unknown, or
that information concerning them was poorly distributed. Rather,
they were too well known and their advocates were too enthusiastic.
Consequently all such evidence was examined with extremes of
scientiWc caution and criticism and unnecessarily rejected as, at
best, not proven. The net eVect of such caution, laudable as it may
be in any abstract judgement of science as an activity, was that with
the authority of Cuvier, as perpetuated by Buckland, it could be
maintained that:
8 A note from Roach-Smith, dated 31 January 1852, says, ‘The people of Liverpool
will elect you into their Society’ (ibid.). A footnote in Boucher de Perthes 1857
suggests that Dr A. Hume published in Liverpool in 1851 a memoir entitled Stone
Period ‘where a part of the work of M. Boucher de Perthes 1847 was translated and his
Wgures reproduced’. The British Museum does not have a record of this publication
nor have 1 been able to trace it elsewhere. The clustering of these events in the years
immediately after 1849 and the inclusion of a slip in my volume of Boucher de
Perthes 1847 that reads ‘Cet ouvrage, imprimé en 1847, n’a pu, en raison des
circonstances, être publié qu’en 1849’, indicate that despite the date of 1847 on the
title page, this volume was not distributed until 1849; its publication date should
therefore be the later date.
24 Jacob W. Gruber](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-40-2048.jpg)
![The only evidence that has yet been collected upon this subject [the an-
tiquity of man] is negative; but as far as this extends, no conclusion is more
fully established than the important fact of the total absence of any vestiges
of the human species throughout the entire series of geological formations.
Had the case been otherwise, there would indeed have been great diYculty
in reconciling the early and extended periods which have been assigned to
the extinct races of animals with our received chronology. On the other
hand, the fact of no human remains having as yet been found in conjunction
with those of extinct animals, may be alleged in conWrmation of the hy-
pothesis that these animals lived and died before the creation of man.
(Buckland 1837: i. 103)
Still later, the world of the 1850s, secure now in its traditional faith in
revelation and in its new-found allegiance to science, could echo the
heartfelt and poetic expression that Hugh Miller gave of the com-
patibility between these two sources of truth:
It may be safely stated . . . that that ancient record in which man is repre-
sented as the last born of creation, is opposed by no geological fact; and that
if, according to Chalmers, ‘the Mosaic writings do not Wx the antiquity of the
globe’, they at least do Wx—making allowance, of course, for the varying
estimates of the chronologer—‘the antiquity of the human species’. The
great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some
old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form—at once hieroglyphic and
Wgure—bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and
Wnish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very
wonderful harmony manifested in that nice sequence in which the inverte-
brates—the Wshes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental
mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged.9
(Miller 1857: 132–3)
Rising above the voices of those whose interests introduced a some-
times strident note into their advocacy of the new palliative, was the
clear and measured tone of Lyell’s authority. Although no progres-
sionist himself, he was Wrm in his view as he disposed one after
another, of the claims for man’s antiquity, that ‘we have every reason
9 The chapter from which this portion is quoted was delivered as a lecture before
the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1853. Miller committed suicide on
Christmas Eve, 1856.
Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 25](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-41-2048.jpg)
![Falconer, trained in medicine but active as both botanist and
palaeontologist, William Pengelly, a provincial schoolteacher, and
Joseph Prestwich, wine merchant. These men are interesting symbols
of the ferment that was altering the whole substance of nineteenth-
century natural science.11 Pengelly and Prestwich were both amateurs
in the sense that, like most of their co-workers, they lacked formal
training in science and were able to ‘geologize’ only during those scant
hours stolen from their more mundane pursuits.12 They formed part
of that large and enthusiastic body for whose works John Herschel
(1830: 15–16) had written the justiWcation:
The highest degrees of worldly prosperity, are so far from being incompatible
with them [scientiWc researches] that they supply additional advantages for
their pursuits . . . They may be enjoyed, too, in the intervals of the most active
business; and the calm and dispassionate interest with which they Wll the
mind renders them a most delightful retreat from the agitations and dissen-
sions of the world, and from the conXict of passions, prejudices, and interests
in which the man of business Wnds himself continually involved.
Their heroes were, during these maturing decades of natural science,
the leaders of geology—the Lyells, Murchisons, Owens, and Buck-
lands—whose extensive publications and commanding positions
provided them with the authority of intellectual command. Although
Pengelly and Prestwich were exceptional in their command of the
Weld, there were many of their kind whose primarily descriptive
articles Wll the geological journals of the period. These were initially
collectors and observers whose more limited contributions provided
the factual bases for the broader syntheses of their leaders. DiYdent
and often practical, they were in tune with their times; and in their
caution they were often led to a conservatism which maintained
11 All three men have been memorialized in a fashion. Both Prestwich and
Pengelly are the subjects of the typical nineteenth-century biographical memoir:
Pengelly’s by his daughter (H. Pengelly 1897) and Prestwich’s by his wife
(G. Prestwich 1899). Both are long tributes that conceal more than they inform.
Falconer’s biographical legacy, unfortunately for so interesting a Wgure in the history
of nineteenth-century science, is a collection of his works, most of them previously
unpublished, prefaced by a brief biographical notice, a respectful and judicious
treatment that adds little to the knowledge of the man (Falconer 1868).
12 In 1874, however, Prestwich, at 62 years old, was appointed Professor of
Geology at Oxford; but this was little more than an honorary post.
Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 27](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-43-2048.jpg)
![wash-out unless something can be done quickly, as I suppose
Jordan will be promoted very soon.’ (Jordan was the senior
subaltern.) ‘You know how much I want to get back in time
for the big show. Can you do anything? Sorry to trouble you,
and now I must close.
‘Yours,
‘W. Pickersdyke.’
Then he summoned his servant. Gunner Scupham was an elderly
individual with grey hair, a dignified deportment, and a countenance
which suggested extreme honesty of soul but no intelligence
whatsoever. Which fact was of great assistance to him in the
perpetration of his more complicated villainies. He had not been
Pickersdyke’s storeman for many years for nothing. His devotion was
a by-word, but his familiarity was sometimes a little startling.
‘’E won’t let us go,’ announced Pickersdyke.
‘Strafe the blighter!’ replied Scupham feelingly. ‘I’m proper fed up
with this ’ere column job.’
‘Get the office bike, take this note to Captain Lorrison, and bring
back an answer. Here’s a pass.’
Scupham departed, grumbling audibly. It meant a fifteen-mile
ride, the day was warm, and he disliked physical exertion. He
returned late that evening with the answer, which was as follows:
‘Dear Pickers,—Curse your fool colonel. Jordan may go any
day, and if we don’t get you we’ll probably be stuck with
some child who knows nothing. Besides, we want you to
come. The preliminary bombardment is well under way, so
there’s not much time. Meet me at the B.A.C.[7] headquarters
to-morrow evening at 8 and we’ll fix up something. In haste,
‘Yours ever,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-72-2048.jpg)
![‘T. Lorrison.’
There are people who do not believe in luck. But if it was not luck
which assisted Pickersdyke by producing the events which followed
his receipt of that note, then it was Providence in a genial and most
considerate mood. He spent a long time trying to think of a
reasonable excuse for going to see Lorrison, but he might have
saved himself the trouble. Some light-hearted fool had sent up
shrapnel instead of high explosive to the very B.A.C. that
Pickersdyke wanted to visit. Angry telephone messages were coming
through, and the colonel at once sent his adjutant up to offer
plausible explanations.
Pickersdyke covered a lot of ground that afternoon. It was
necessary to find an infuriated artillery brigadier and persuade him
that the error was not likely to occur again, and was in any case not
really the fault of the D.A.C. section commander. It was then
necessary to find this latter and make it clear to him that he was
without doubt the most incompetent officer in the allied forces, and
that the error was entirely due to his carelessness. And it was
essential to arrange for forwarding what was required.
Lorrison arrived punctually and evidently rather excited.
‘What price the news?’ he said at once.
Pickersdyke had heard none. He had been far too busy.
‘We’re for it at last—going to bombard all night till 4.30 a.m.—every
bally gun in the army as far as I can see. And we’ve got orders to be
ready to move in close support of the infantry if they get through. To
move! Just think of that after all these months.’
Pickersdyke swore as he had not done since he was a rough-riding
bombardier.
‘And that’s boxed my chances,’ he ended up.
‘Wait a bit,’ said Lorrison. ‘There’s a vacancy waiting for you if
you’ll take it. We got pretty badly “crumped”[8] last night. The](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-73-2048.jpg)
![from far away to the eastward there came faint, confused sounds of
shouts and cheering. It was the infantry, the long-suffering,
tenacious, wonderful infantry charging valiantly into the cold grey
dawn along the avenues prepared by the guns....
For Pickersdyke it had been a night of pure joy, unspoilt by any
qualms of conscience. He had been welcomed at the battery as a
kind of returned wanderer and given a section of guns at once. The
major—who feared no man’s wrath, least of all that of a dug-out
D.A.C. commander—had promised to back him up if awkward
questions were asked. Pickersdyke had only one cause for
disappointment—the whole thing had gone too smoothly. He was
bursting with technical knowledge, he could have repaired almost
any breakdown, and had kept a keen look-out for all ordinary
mistakes. But nothing went wrong and no mistakes were made. In
this battery the liability of human error had been reduced to a
negligible minimum. Pickersdyke had had nothing further to do than
to pass orders and see that they were duly received. Nevertheless
he had loved every moment of it, for he had come into his own—he
was back in the old troop, taking part in a ‘big show.’ As he observed
to the major whilst they were drinking hot coffee in the dug-out
afterwards:
‘Even if I do get court-martialled for desertion, sir, that last little
lot was worth it!’
And he grinned as does a man well pleased with the success of his
schemes. To complete his satisfaction, Scupham appeared soon
afterwards bringing up a large bundle of kit and a few luxuries in the
way of food. It transpired that he had presented himself to the last-
joined subaltern of the D.A.C. and had bluffed that perplexed and
inexperienced officer into turning out a cart to drive him as far as
the battery wagon line, whence he had come up on an ammunition
wagon.
It was almost daylight when the battery opened fire again, taking
its orders by telephone now from the F.O.O.,[9] who was in close
touch with the infantry and could see what was happening. The rate](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/81837-250225184916-f09a8bfe/75/Histories-of-Archaeology-A-Reader-in-the-History-of-Archaeology-1st-Edition-Tim-Murray-76-2048.jpg)
Histories of Archaeology A Reader in the History of Archaeology 1st Edition Tim Murray
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- 5. Histories of ArchaeologyA Reader in the History of Archaeology 1st Edition Tim Murray Digital Instant Download Author(s): TimMurray, Christopher Evans ISBN(s): 9780199550081, 0199550085 Edition: 1 File Details: PDF, 3.24 MB Year: 2008 Language: english
- 7.
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- 9. HISTORIES OF ARCHAEOLOGY A Readerin the History of Archaeology Edited by TIM MURRAY AND CHRISTOPHER EVANS 1
- 10. 3 Great Clarendon Street,Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Oxford University Press 2008 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Histories of archaeology : a reader in the history of archaeology / edited by Tim Murray and Christopher Evans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–955008–1 ISBN 978–0–19–955007–4 1. Archaeology–Historiography. 2. Archaeology–History. 3. Archaeology and history. 4. Archaeology–Social aspects. 5. Archaeology–Political aspects. I. Murray, Tim, 1955– II. Evans, Christopher, 1955– CC100.H57 2008 930.1—dc22 2008022397 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–955008–1 (Pbk.) 978–0–19–955007–4 (Hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
- 11. To the memoryof Bruce Trigger (1937–2006) pioneer historian of archaeology
- 12. This page intentionallyleft blank
- 13. Contents List of Illustrationsix 1. Introduction 1 2. Jacob W. Gruber: Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man (1965) 13 3. David Clarke: Introduction and Polemic (1968) 46 4. Jim Allen: Perspectives of a Sentimental Journey: V. Gordon Childe in Australia 1917–1921 (1981) 58 5. Martin Hall: The Burden of Tribalism: The Social Context of Southern African Iron Age Studies (1984) 72 6. Don D. Fowler: Uses of the Past: Archaeology in the Service of the State (1987) 93 7. Bettina Arnold: The Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany (1990) 120 8. Tim Murray: The History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Archaeology: The Case of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882) (1990) 145 9. Douglas R. Givens: The Role of Biography in Writing the History of Archaeology (1992) 177 10. Michael Dietler: ‘Our Ancestors the Gauls’: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe (1994) 194 11. Christopher Evans: Archaeology against the State: Roots of Internationalism (1995) 222 12. Suzanne L. Marchand: Kultur and the World War (1996) 238 13. Margarita Dı́az-Andreu and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen: Excavating Women: Towards an Engendered History of Archaeology (1998) 279 14. Leo Klejn: Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) (2001) 312
- 14. 15. Pedro PauloA. Funari: A History of Archaeology in Brazil (2001). 328 16. Wiktor Stoczkowski: How to BeneWt from Received Ideas (2001) 346 17. Bruce Trigger: Historiography (2001) 360 18. Marc-Antoine Kaeser: On the International Roots of Prehistory (2002) 378 19. Alain Schnapp: Between Antiquarians and Archaeologists—Continuities and Ruptures (2002) 392 Original Publication Details 406 References 408 Index 463 viii Contents
- 15. List of Illustrations 1.1Darwin’s ‘Tree of Evolution’ from The Origin of Species of 1859; Kroeber’s ‘Tree of Life’ and ‘Tree of Knowledge’. 2 7.1 Gustav Kossinna. 122 7.2 A distribution of ‘Germanic’ territory during the Bronze Age. 123 7.3 Title page of the journal Die Kunde (1936). 130 7.4 Etching of Externsteine near Horn, from Kreis Lippe 1748. 132 7.5 Example of ‘Germanenkitsch’ advertisement from the journal Germanenerbe (1936). 133 7.6 Bronze-Age ‘Germans’. 138 10.1 Bronze statue of Vercingetorix by Millet (1865). 204 10.2 Bronze statue of Vercingetorix by Bartholdi (1870). 206 10.3 Painting of a ‘Gallic chief near the Roche Salvée of Beuvray inspecting the horizon’, by Jules Didier (1895). 220 12.1 The Kaiser’s dig at Corfu, c.1911. Wilhelm is pictured centre. 257 12.2 Theodor Wiegand on patrol with the German-Turkish Monument Protection Commando, c.1917. 267 13.1 Johanna Mestorf. 294 13.2 Conference participants at the Wrst meeting of the International Congress of Prehistoric Sciences in 1932. 301 18.1 Edouard Desor (1811–82), the initiator of the International Congress of Prehistory. 386 18.2 Letter from Gabriel de Mortillet to Edouard Desor, 22 June 1865. 389 18.3 Participants of the Wfth meeting of the International Congress of Prehistory in Bologna (1871). 390 19.1 ‘Greek’ Menu for the 12th de Mortillet Dinner (9 February 1901). Classical motifs: statue, Athena’s owl, and a red-on-black nymph-chasing scene. 393
- 16. This page intentionallyleft blank
- 17. 1 Introduction: Writing Histories ofArchaeology Tim Murray and Christopher Evans TREES AND META-NARRATIVES: HISTORIES OF ARCHAEOLOGY Any one of several organic analogies, particularly that of the Tree of Knowledge, might usefully serve as the leitmotif of this volume, and to help justify our choice of the plural in its title—‘Histories of Archaeology’, as opposed to the singular case prefaced with The or A. ‘Trees of Knowledge’ and/or ‘Development’ were widely used to portray nineteenth- and early twentieth-century knowledge systems, be they in architecture, languages, or race, and Pitt Rivers, for example, was especially fond of them. Trees can also symbolize the growth of disciplines. Archaeology had its roots in antiquarianism, history, philology, ethnology, geology, and natural history generally. From this grew the trunk that eventually branched out into various sub-disciplines (e.g. biblical, Roman, medieval, scientiWc, and ‘new’ archaeology). The great meta-narratives of the history of archaeology have followed this approach, with ‘archaeological thought’ or ‘arch- aeological ideas’ having a common inheritance or ancestry in nine- teenth-century positivist European science. From this main root- stock, it eventually branched into subdivisions and out into the world at large, fostering oVspring archaeologies diVerentiated by geography, tradition, subWeld, or time period (Daniel 1975; Trigger 1989).
- 18. Our aim inthis volume, and that of much of recent archaeological historiography, is to challenge this meta-narrative and to demonstrate that there has been a great deal more variability of thought and practice in the Weld than has been acknowledged. In this context we think that Kroeber’s ‘Tree of Life/Culture’ (1948) (see Fig. 1.1) is a more accurate visualization of the growth of archaeology. Instead of just branching ‘naturally’, Kroeber’s branches have the capacity to grow back on themselves and coalesce in the way that ‘thought’, figure 1.1 Darwin’s ‘Tree of Evolution’ from The Origin of Species of 1859 (top); below, Kroeber’s ‘Tree of Life’ (left) and ‘Tree of Knowledge’ (right; after Kroeber 1948: 260). 2 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 19. ‘subjects’, and/or ‘institutions’/‘networks’do. Yet Kroeber’s model still relies on a single main trunk. If applied to the history of archaeology it would not distinguish, for example, that antiquarianism did not conveniently die out with the advent of archaeology as a discipline, and that its history and development has always involved multiple strands—in essence the existence of other possibilities and practices. We intend this volume to stimulate the exploration of these other possible archaeologies, past, present, and future, and to help us acknowledge that the creation of world archaeologies, and the multi- plication of interests and objectives among both the producers and consumers of archaeological knowledge, will drive the creation of still further variability. However, part of any acknowledgement of alternatives and diVerences is the recognition of similarities that derive from a common inheritance. SigniWcant issues in contempor- ary archaeological practice are whether there is an irreducible discip- linary core, whether archaeology as a discipline exists, and whether archaeologists working in diVerent Welds, or from diVerent perspec- tives, have enough in common to engage in meaningful disciplinary conversation. We strongly believe that the history of archaeology has a vital role to play in ensuring that such conversations occur, and that they do so in an informed manner. Histories of Archaeology This book has its origins in the Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archae- ology in the Light of Its History Conference held in Göteborg under the auspices of the Archives of European Archaeology (AREA) project.1 Over the course of three days more than a hundred participantsengaged in intensive debate aboutthe nature of the history of archaeology and its importance to the discipline in general. There was a real sense that the historiography of archaeology had Wnally arrived as a legitimate and exciting Weld of archaeological research. There was also considerable surprise at the richness and diversity of contemporary research, and the sense of rapidlyexpanding possibilities for research across a broad range 1 The history of AREA is fully described in Antiquity ‘Special Section’ vol. 76, 2002. See the AREA web site: <http://www.area-archives.org>. Introduction 3
- 20. of interests—from biographiesof practitioners both ‘famous’ and less well-known, through to the histories of archaeological institutions and, of course, studies of the social and cultural contexts of archaeological knowledge. The days of regular programmatic announcements about the importance of the history of archaeology could now be declared over, as practitioners recognized that in excess of forty years of research and writing had accumulated a body of work that has become a keystone to any mature reading of the discipline. The papers from the Göteborg conference will be published in another volume in this series (for which see Schlanger and Nord- bladh forthcoming). Our reader comprises papers drawn from the years preceding all the excitement in Sweden, and represents a small sample of work published in English in the key areas of the Weld— historiography, biography, institutional histories, studies of the social and cultural contexts of archaeological knowledge, and studies of the evolution of archaeology as a distinct discipline. Robust arguments for the importance of the history of archaeology (both to practi- tioners and to others), especially its capacity to underwrite critical agendas, are hardly new (e.g. Fahnestock 1984; Pinsky and Wylie 1989; see also Christenson 1989), and several of the papers reprinted here (especially Murray, Stoczkowski, and Trigger) should be seen as contributions to that literature. Even more common are detailed discussions of the embeddedness of archaeology in the nationalist projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or indeed in imperial projects during the same period (e.g. Castro-Klarén and Chasteen 2003; Dı́az-Andreu and Champion 1996; Kane 2003; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Oyuela-Caycedo 1994; Reid 2002; Rowan and Baram 2004; Schmidt and Patterson 1996; Silberman 1989). Our primary goal in reprinting these papers is to present them as exemplars of diVerent subjects, approaches, and purposes in writing histories of archaeology. However, it is vital to understand that we do not in any way consider these to form the canon of archaeological historiography. There are a great many Wne discussions in English, let alone French, German, Spanish, and indeed Mandarin that we have not selected for a wide variety of reasons such as insuYcient space, or a need to deliver a breadth of approaches rather than many excellent examples of the same approach. It is essential that readers do not see these reprinted papers as elements of a cookbook on how 4 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 21. to do thehistory of archaeology. For us the Weld stands very much at the beginning of a long process where it becomes more fully articu- lated into mainstream archaeology and its concerns. Thus the history of archaeology (like archaeology itself) is not, nor ever will be, fully formed or Wnalized in the areas of its interest or concern. The roughly forty years that these papers span is testimony to this crucial point. Beginning with Gruber’s justly famous discussion of Brixham Cave and ending with Alain Schnapp’s eloquent plea for archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of antiquarianism in the history of their discipline (see also Momigliano 1966, 1990; Piggott 1950, 1976; Sweet 2004), the collection charts—if in a rather circular fashion—the evolution of the history of archaeology. The Why, How, and What of the History of Archaeology The Wrst lesson imparted by the collection is that of change, of transformation, not of stasis. These papers show how the concerns of archaeological historiography have developed, and it is for this reason we have arranged them chronologically rather than themat- ically. Of course there have been (and still are) trends and fashions in subject matter. The last twenty years has seen a great expansion in the number of studies of the relationship between archaeology and nationalism, and of the role of women in the history of the discipline. Many of these trends are the direct result of changing interests and foci within the practice of archaeology itself—a concern with the social and cultural contexts of archaeological knowledge production, or the uses to which states or ethnic groups have put archaeological information. But archaeologists’ interests do not comprise the only vector of change. While some archaeologists concerned with theory have shown an interest in the history and philosophy of science (HPS), work undertaken by non-archaeologists in the history of archaeology (including in HPS contexts elsewhere) has also enriched the history of archaeology and textured our understanding of the genesis and dissemination of archaeological knowledge (see e.g. Morse 2005; Theunissen 1989; Van Riper 1993). The second lesson Xows from the notion of change and develop- ment, and is best summed up as a question. What role does, or Introduction 5
- 22. should, the historyof archaeology play in the practice of archaeology? This is a perennial question, and there is every reason why it should be so. Any reputable history of archaeology (but see especially Daniel 1981; Murray 1999c, 2001, 2002; Schnapp 1996; Trigger 1989) rehearses the many beneWts to practitioners (and others) that Xow from a deep engagement with the history of our discipline, and there is no need to repeat them here. SigniWcantly, our understanding of those beneWts has itself changed over time, especially with regard to the development of a more sophisticated understanding of the notion of disciplinary culture and the sociology of archaeological knowledge. The notion of the discipline of archaeology, as both a body of specialized knowledge and skills and a political institution, has under- written much recent history of archaeology, although the real focus here has been on the exploration of archaeological institutions as the means of marking out domains of knowledge and of socializing budding practitioners.2 This has proved to be of enduring import- ance as historians of archaeology explore the creation of disciplinary institutions such as university departments, museums, and journals, the recruitment and training of archaeologists, and the funding of major archaeological projects. Perhaps of even greater importance is an engagement with more fundamental questions concerning the identity of archaeology, particularly its distinctiveness with respect to cognate disciplines such as anthropology or history. The focus on institutions, and of ‘deeper’ history, are exempliWed in this collection by Murray, Stoczkowski, and Kaeser, but it is also seen in more polemical histories of archaeology, such as that of David Clarke. History of Archaeology as Polemic Some years ago Murray observed that: Each new account of the archaeologist’s project, from the nineteenth century onward, has led to a rewriting of disciplinary history by advocates of new approaches. There is an obvious reason why this should happen, and it has to do with justifying behaviour that might be construed as being destabil- izing or ‘unhelpful’ by other practitioners. One way of doing this is to 2 See Lemaine et al. (eds.) for a comprehensive discussion of the theory of disciplines. 6 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 23. establish that yourview has a respectable historical pedigree. Even better is to claim that the urgency of your drive for reformation is fuelled by an understanding that archaeologists have for too long done things incorrectly, or have not done some important things at all, and you are now about to set the record straight. (1999a: 871–2) There are many excellent examples of archaeology as polemic. These include Hodder’s opening barrage in Symbolic and Structural Archae- ology (1982a), Miller’s pungent rejection of processualism in Artefacts as Categories (1985), Lewis Binford’s vivid autobiographical pieces (1972, 1983, 1989) and, more recently, histories to underpin the launching of evolutionary archaeology (Lyman and O’Brien 2006; O’Brien et al. 2005) or other less mainstream programmes (Thomas 2004). The introduction to Analytical Archaeology, which we reprint here, has all the hallmarks of history of archaeology as polemic in that it announced a consciously diVerent conception of what the discipline had been, was, and could become. It is angry and opinion- ated, and by contemporary standards demonstrates that Clarke was a much more innovative theoretician than a historian. Archaeology in Its Social and Cultural Context Having three chapters speciWcally concerned with the history of archaeology and issues of nationalism and/or the state (Arnold, Dietler, and Fowler)—and two others that address its corollary, internationalism, and are thereby also relevant (Evans and Kaeser)— it could be argued that this theme is overrepresented in this volume. Archaeology demands considerable public expenditure, and as a result it has come to have a closer relationship to state politics (and its sponsorship) than many other social sciences. Equally, this em- phasis on nationalism is justiWed given how much it has been a feature of historiographic research since the 1980s, through the impact of post-processualism and its emphasis upon identity and the social context of knowledge (this still being furthered by the schism between the UISPP (Union internationale des sciences préhis- toriques et protohistoriques) and WAC (World Archaeological Con- gress) of the second half of that decade). Introduction 7
- 24. Of the chaptersconcerned with this theme, Fowler’s is certainly the most wide-ranging and, apart from a general overview of the (re) formulation of the past in the historical past, variously covers its role in Mexico, Britain, and China. Arnold’s now classic 1990 chapter, in contrast, speciWcally considers the use of the past as a tool of political legitimization and propaganda by the German National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s, and the ‘Faustian Bargain’ many prehistorians of the time made with the Nazi regime. Reviewing the impact of Kossinna’s work (sharing ground with Klejn’s contribution), it also outlines their ethnocentric interpretation of archaeological data, which here Wnds resonance in Hall’s discussion of ethnicity, peoples, and tribes in the southern African Iron Age. Dietler’s 1994 chapter concerned with Celtic/Gaulish identity in France is a richly textured account that tackles its subject on a number of diVerent levels. A highly malleable and multifaceted source of identity (e.g. ‘sustained resistance’, ‘noble defeat’, or ‘energetic spirit’), he variously explores its use in the construction of the French nation/state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its employment today fostering pan-Europeanism, and also as a basis of deeply rooted, speciWcally regional (anti-state) expression in Brittany. While all three authors warn that their studies variously demand that archaeologists become self-critically aware of contemporary socio-political factors and that they are responsible in their broader interpretations, taken together these contributions also reXect upon the complexity of social/cul- tural identities in general. Kaeser’s and Evans’s respective approaches to the theme of inter- nationalism vary greatly. As opposed to those who would have the project of archaeology entirely embedded within nationalism (e.g. Dı́az-Andreu and Champion 1996), Kaeser focuses on the inter- national ethos that drove much of the institutional formulation of archaeology in the later half of the nineteenth century. Employing as his exemplar the International Congress of Prehistory of the time, he argues that many national societies were founded only subsequent to the International Congress, and as a direct outcome of the attention Wrst given to the subject through its international presence (i.e. nationalist perspectives, therefore, being something we/the discipline enter into voluntarily). Clearly this is a perspective sympathetic to Schnapp’s, with respect to the universality of mid and later 8 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 25. nineteenth-century archaeological practices,as opposed to the re- gional/national emphasis of earlier antiquarian study (see also Schnapp 1996). On the other hand Evans’s 1995 chapter is concerned with the later, post-World War II expression of internationalist interests and, speciWcally, with Grahame Clark’s ‘World Prehistory’. Drawing upon transcripts of wartime conference proceedings, he stresses that— buoyed by emergent science—this new global perspective was not born just out of post-war modernist idealism, but also in direct response to the pre-war nationalist archaeologies and, particularly, Clark’s tacit support of some German National Socialist archaeo- logical practices (e.g. the advantages of large-scale state sponsorship). In the case of Britain, the debates that then occurred on the confer- ence Xoor can be seen as engendering what was to become a major split in its archaeology, between worldly academics and more state- sympathetic, ‘homeland’ professionals. Of course, this is ultimately only a matter of emphasis. National/international archaeologies are not a matter of either/or, and both axes (or ‘pulls’) have always coexisted within the discipline. This is even true of the archaeology/antiquarian divide; the one only superseded the other within a certain sphere of academic endeavour and, since the later nineteenth century, what are essentially antiquarian practices and interests have continued to thrive at a local societal level (see Evans 2007). Individuals and Institutions In the History of Archaeology Archaeological biographies are enduringly popular, among archae- ologists as well as members of the general public. ExempliWed by Joan Evans’s (1943) study of her family’s archaeological forebears, or Piggott’s analysis of William Stukeley (1950) and Trigger’s Gordon Childe (1980b), individual biographies of celebrated archaeologists have long featured in the history of the subject. The recent publica- tion of Fagan’s study of Grahame Clark (2001), P. J. Smith’s research on Dorothy Garrod (see e.g. 2000), or Adkins’s Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (2003), and also Murray’s comprehensive Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Introduction 9
- 26. Archaeologists (1999c) (includingmore than Wfty commissioned in- tellectual biographies), all demonstrate that this is a trend that is likely to continue. However, much less attention has been paid to the issues raised and the challenges posed by them. Murray (1999a) provides a framework for practice, but the earlier paper by Givens, which is reprinted here, reports the experience of a seasoned practi- tioner who had recently completed a biography of A. V. Kidder (Givens 1992). The two biographies we reprint here, Allen’s brief analysis of a crucial passage in the life of Gordon Childe and Klejn’s more broad-ranging discussion of Gustav Kossinna, exemplify many of the strengths of biography as a means of engaging with matters of context, both small and large. Yet both these archaeologists are, by any reckoning, major Wgures in our discipline and there has, until very recently, been scant attention paid to minor Wgures. However, since 2005 in Britain, there have been conferences concerned with the archaeological activities of, respectively, Canon Greenwell and Fred- erick Lukis. Neither of these Wgures has been counted amongst the front ranks of the discipline (and do not feature in Trigger’s comprehensive survey, nor in Murray’s collection). Yet, in-depth contextual studies of such overlooked Wgures allow for reappraisal of other facets of nineteenth-century archaeology (e.g. the impact of racialist perspectives and collection activities) that have been largely ignored in the mainstream, ‘history of ideas’ narratives of the subject’s development. Augmenting the ‘big man’ or ‘pioneering individual’ view of much of the subject’s written history, in recent years the impact of discip- linary networks and their orchestration have received considerable attention. Here, Gruber’s insightful study of the reception of the Brixham Cave results could be cited as an example among many (e.g. Levine 1986). In a similar vein, Kaeser’s article in this volume elegantly advocates the need to study the context of archaeology’s institutions. Singularly reXecting upon the social construction of the discipline, he argues that institutional history provides a basis to bridge socio-historical and cognitive factors, allowing us to move beyond the dichotomies of the sociology of science on the one hand and, on the other, the history of ideas alone (and also the opposition between internalist and externalist history; see Evans 1956; Pearce 2007; and Vyner 1994 for speciWc institutional histories, 10 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 27. Grahame Clark 1989on the history of archaeology at Cambridge University, and also Richard 1992, generally on this theme). Writing the History of Archaeology Into the Future One of the pleasures of assembling and closely reading so many contributions (both those included and those, regretfully, omitted) is revisiting well-crafted essays. Some are inherently ‘workman-like’ and succinctly drive towards their key theme. Yet, sharing qualities of Wne short story writing, the best have the ability to convey a greater breadth of scholarship and (often through the use of notes) hint at allied research themes well beyond the limits imposed by their page length. Further to their ‘style’, many of the papers included here are without any illustration and, otherwise, the inclusion of Wgures is minimal. Appropriate to a history of ideas, they are essentially textual works—the subject reading its past. Yet among the social sciences, archaeology, to a unique degree, involves complex visualization and, as here touched upon by Schnapp, the seeing/rendering of sites and objects is fundamental to the understanding of stratigraphy and typology. The paucity of illustrations within the selected papers is, in part, a product of their dates of publication and increasingly over the last ten to Wfteen years, if falling short of a distinct school, the role of graphics within the subject’s development has begun to be high- lighted (e.g. Evans 1994, 2000, and 2004; Lewuillon 2002; Smiles and Moser 2005). Being still primarily concerned with ‘core’ issues in the intellectual formulation of the discipline, this volume has, admittedly, something of a prehistoric bias. In this regard, the publication of Hingley’s (2000) study concerned with the Edwardian origins of Romano-British archaeology, Roman OYcers and English Gentlemen, must be noted, andsimilarperiod-speciWc historiographies can be anticipated. Equally, aside from Hall’s chapter, although a number of the contributions here are wide-ranging in their international scope, its selections are largely drawn from what can only be considered the Anglo-European canon. As demonstrated, for example, by the contents of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology and the Wnal three volumes of the Encyclo- pedia of Archaeology (Murray 2001), archaeological historiography has Introduction 11
- 28. become a serioussubject for research. Given this, we can only look forward to ‘other’ histories of the subject, which both explore (and potentially reject) contemporary readings of the construction of the discipline, and that may well give rise to quite diVerent histories of the past. As the history of archaeology begins to intersect more directly with the mainstream of our discipline, new histories (such as Lucas’s recent appraisal of Anglo-American excavation procedures 2001: ch. 2) will also arise from this stimulation. But this is entirely as it should be, and a sure testament to the growing importance of historiography in the development of archaeological theory and method. Indeed, the history of archaeology provides one of the most abundant sources of opportunities for archaeologists to revisit their theoretical inheritance and to explore whether previously ig- nored or discarded ideas and approaches might yet have something to say to us in the present and in the future (see e.g. Murray 1999b). Inspiration is everywhere. We dedicate this book to the memory of Bruce Trigger who, more than anyone else, worked to establish the history of archaeology as being both a legitimate and consequential Weld of research for archaeologists and others. 12 Tim Murray and Christopher Evans
- 29. 2 Brixham Cave andthe Antiquity of Man Jacob W. Gruber The key concern of Gruber’s pioneering essay of 1965 is time: both the establishment of its geological depth and the antiquity of Early Man, and also its speciWc dimension within historiography and the develop- ment of archaeology itself. EVectively, his starting point is a remark by Grahame Clark that it was the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 that ultimately led to the acceptance of ‘deep’ human antiquity. However, Gruber’s close reading of the sources demonstrates that this was, in fact, determined by the acceptance of Falconer et al.’s results from the Brixham Cave excavations of the previous year. Yet, this is not just a matter of ‘discovery’ and setting the record straight, but rather the nature of knowledge claims and disciplinary change. Much of the material upon which this chapter is based was gathered during the course of a sabbatical leave granted by Temple University and with the aid of a fellowship from the National Science Foundation and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies; to these institutions I wish to express both acknow- ledgement of and gratitude for the aid given. I wish to express particularly my appreciation to Mr Wilfrid T. Wiatt and to the Torquay Natural History Society of which he is honorary secretary for the cooperation in making available to me the Pengelly manuscripts in the possession of the society; to the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in London; and to Mlle Lecat, Librarian of the Bibliothèque Commu- nale d’Abbeville for making available the correspondence to Boucher de Perthes. In addition, I am grateful to Dr Walter F. Cannon, Dr John Cotter, and Dr John C. Greens for reading earlier versions of this chapter and for the liberality of their comments. The inclusion of this chapter in this volume cannot, however, pass without my acknowledgement to Dr Hallowell for the invaluable stimulation of his many conversations with me.
- 30. During the pastWfteen years, human palaeontology has been revit- alized by a series of discoveries whose interpretation has produced a new excitement in the search for man’s ancestry. New paths of human evolution are replacing those that have become rutted through decades of repetition of the same data and the same theories. The current vigour recalls the new spirit of just a century ago when, during the 1850s and early 1860s, the discoveries of the ‘cave men’ revolutionized the concept of man’s past and created for him a previously unbelievable antiquity. Like those discoveries, the Wnds of our generation, culminating in the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, have led to a re-examination of the bases of human behaviour and its development. Hallowell’s own stimulating examinations of the nature of the human achievement, of human nature itself, have been instrumental in that redeWnition of man’s uniqueness that underlies the contemporary search for the human threshold in the evolutionary past. And with the reawakening of studies of human evolution both physically and behaviourally, it is perhaps of some interest to examine those events of an earlier period, in an earlier state of the science, that provided the foundations of both data and concept upon which our present knowledge and interests have been built. Looking backwards to events of a seemingly distant past, English geologist James Geikie wrote in 1881 that: When the announcement was made some years ago that rude stone imple- ments of undoubted human workmanship had been discovered in certain alluvial deposits in the valley of the river Somme under circumstances which argued for the human race a very high antiquity, geologists generally re- ceived the news with incredulity. That the advent of man was an occurrence merely of yesterday, as it were, and a matter to be discussed properly by chronologists and historians alone, most of us until lately were taught to believe. So ingrained, indeed, had this belief become, that although evidence of the antiquity of our race similar to those subsequent French discoveries, which succeeded at last in routing the skeptical indiVerence of geologists, had been noted from time to time . . . yet it was only noted to be explained away, and in point of fact was persistently neglected as of no importance. (Geikie 1881: 3) 14 Jacob W. Gruber
- 31. The events towhich Geikie referred were indeed of his own era; they were less than a generation past. It is true that when Geikie wrote with such certitude, there were still a few scattered voices frantically raised in defence of man’s recent origins and recent history; but these were the last laments for the loss of a ‘recent’ creation of mankind. Their very shrillness of tone betrayed the weakness of their position. They were the echoes of a past’s prevailing theme, reverberating hollowly in the new chamber into which the new science of prehistory had ushered man. Geikie was writing during a period of calm that followed one of the great intellectual revolutions of the nineteenth-century—the discov- ery of man’s past. It was a revolution the more intolerable because it was so personal, because it struck so violently at man’s most hallowed conception of himself. After a time, the threads of history become tangled and the individuality of movements and events become confused and compressed into an unreal simplicity conWned within the rubric of an ism. Old channels of thought—originally separate and distinct—are covered over and lost as the new cuts its way more deeply into the changing landscape of the mind. It is perhaps of some value to retrace, in some fashion, these features of an earlier intellectual horizon. The ideological conquests during the nineteenth century of the idea of organic evolution have led to the general acceptance of an intimate association between the concept of man’s high antiquity and that of organic evolution. So closely have these two revolutionary concepts come to be related that the former is often thought to have been but an inevitable conceptual and chronological consequence of the latter. Thus Graham Clark, in surveying the growth of prehistory as a science, notes that ‘It needed a revolution in man’s conception of nature and antiquity of man as an organism before the bare notion of primary prehistory could take birth. Such a revolution was wrought by the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species’ (Clark 1957: 32). He goes on to suggest that it was as a result of the Origin that the occasional and previously questioned Wnds of man’s antiquity were re-examined and rehabilitated. The fact that these two intellectual revolutions—the idea that all organic species Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 15
- 32. result, through longperiods of time, from a natural process of generational modiWcation and that man’s demonstrated history is much diVerent from that which any reconciliation with the scrip- tural record or Mosaic chronology can justify—the fact that these two great events in the history of human thought occurred almost simultaneously has led to the generally held conclusion that it was the statement of an acceptable theory of organic evolution that made man’s antiquity both intelligible and defensible. As a matter of historical fact, however, these two concepts, as they emerged a century ago, were the products of two quite separate intellectual traditions—that is, separate to the extent that any two movements within the same intellectual milieu can be said to be separate. The elisions of history, however, have subsequently merged these two separate currents into a single intellectual stream. For much of the nineteenth century, the concept of the antiquity and/or the recent development of mankind had two related but quite diVerent meanings. Of somewhat lesser importance, in the absence of any valid means of measurement, was the absolute age of man’s earthly existence. Much more important, however, was the relative period of man’s emergence or creation as judged by his faunal associations. It was through the analysis of a whole range of such faunal complexes as they revealed themselves in the accumulating body of fossil remains, that the geologists had transformed a succes- sion of lithic strata into a chronologically arranged series of organic communities. Within the limits imposed by credulity, as well as by a geology-based chronology, it was possible to expand man’s history backwards in time so long as the relative position of his emergence was not so altered as to make him a contemporary of fauna foreign to (and therefore assumed to be anterior to) existing forms. To understand the paramount importance for an interpretation of man’s place in nature of this second concept of age, based upon faunal association and the signiWcance of its introduction for both the science and the natural theology of a century and a half ago, we must be aware of the accepted synthesis that had emerged from decades of geological controversy. It was the great French scholar Georges Cuvier who set the tone for the new science of geology by his insistence on observation and his denigration of speculation. The excellence of his comparative anatomy, the dedication of his empiricism, and the 16 Jacob W. Gruber
- 33. rigour of hislogic combined to provide him with that position of authority which directed the thinking of his followers throughout the world long after his death in 1832. Basing his conclusions on his own reconstructions of the strange new mammalian fossils from the Paris basin, this ‘antiquary of a new order’ concluded from the obvious evidence, both geological and palaeontological, that the earth had been visited by a succession of sudden and cataclysmic revolutions. Cuvier noted, ‘Thus we have . . . a series of epochs . . . anterior to the present time, and of which the successive steps may be ascertained with perfect certainty. . . These epochs form so many Wxed points, answering as rules for directing our enquiries respecting the ancient chronology of the earth’ (Cuvier 1817: 8). And each of these epochs, these ‘thousands of ages’ marching inevitably to the present, bore some characteristic segment of the ‘thousands of animals’ that a succession of revolutions had destroyed. The serious and adventur- ous eVorts of numbers of collectors, following in the path that Cuvier had opened, Wlled in the outlines of the palaeontological past in much the same way and with much the same passion and spirit with which the followers of Linnaeus earlier had expanded beyond prior conception the borders of the living universe. The zeal to observe and to record combined with the tedium surrounding the old controversies to produce a new spirit in geology. ‘A new school at last arose,’ wrote the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell, himself one of its most distinguished members: We professed the strictest neutrality. . . and [the members] resolved dili- gently to devote their labours to observation . . . Speculative views were discountenanced . . . To multiply and record observation, and patiently to await the result at some future period, was the object proposed by them; and it was their favourite maxim that the time was not yet come for a general system of geology, but that all must be content for many years to be exclusively engaged in furnishing materials for future generalizations. By acting up to these principles with consistency, they in a few years disarmed all prejudice, and rescued the science from the imputation of being danger- ous, or at best but a visionary pursuit. (Lyell 1855: 58–9) Nevertheless, the very weight of the evidence carved from the super- imposed strata of the earth’s crust produced a generally accepted theory of its past. Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 17
- 34. Time—the restricted timeof literally interpreted scripture—was no longer a problem; eons—stretching back beyond the ken of even the most liberal of a prior generation—were there for the asking. And through a large part of that time, living forms had occupied the earth, albeit forms quite diVerent from those now alive. And in this vast new dimension of the organic universe, there was still design and plan and purpose. Although the Noachian deluge, as the one single catastrophe separating the past from the present, had long been abandoned, it had been supplanted by a series of equally destructive forces whose eVects could be seen in the tilt of the strata and in the exotic fossils they contained. Although an increasing palaeonto- logical sophistication made subtler the spasms that marked the history of the earth, the idea of catastrophism had both popular and scientiWc approval. Almost Wfty years after Cuvier and just prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin, Louis Agassiz, admit- tedly overly enthusiastic in his catastrophism, but still the most popular American natural scientist, could write: Modern science . . . can show in the most satisfactory manner that all Wnite beings have made their appearance successively and at long intervals, and that each kind of organised beings has existed for a deWnite period of time in past ages, and that those now living are of comparative recent origin. At the same time, the order of their succession, and their immutability during such cosmic periods, show no causal connection with physical agents and the known sphere of action of these agents in nature, but argue in favour of repeated interventions on the part of the Creator. (Agassiz 1859: 84) One could not speak—nor think—of one organic universe, but only of many, each succeeding the other in a changing order of separate creations. Arguing from his uniformitarianism, Lyell might maintain that the succession was not to be equated with progression; but in the face of the fossil evidence, his cry, if heard at all, went unheeded. For most, a designed improvement within the established types, as an improvement in the types themselves, was a self-evident fact both in the societies of man and in the creations of God. So readily did the doctrine of progression permit the acceptance of the high antiquity of the earth that within a generation this heresy of a former time had become reconciled with—indeed, a part of—prevailing theological 18 Jacob W. Gruber
- 35. belief. The eVectof the new reconciliation was the onset of a period of intellectual calm during which the Wndings of geology and the interpretations of scripture were made to validate each other to the satisfaction of most of the advocates of both.1 On one conclusion, however, all were agreed: the most important of these creations was the last, that in which mankind appeared, that which Genesis described. Thus, through this new system of belief and its acceptance of a past, man was eVectively insulated by the main- tenance of what was to become a dogma of his own recent creation. Here lay man’s uniqueness, his worth, his tie to God. So long as he could feel himself the product of this last, this most recent, of God’s works, he could feel that special kinship to his creator which made him man and not brute. Mankind’s recent creation, so readily admit- ted and so easily accepted, was adduced as one additional support— in fact, the major one—of the progression of the successive creations of life under divine guidance and within a divine plan. In eVect, the system was a self-sustaining one: the pale ontological succession aVorded evidence of a progressive series; mankind’s position as the most recent of the series supported the view of progression; the separations or breaks in the fossil record, those revolutions for which there was no suYcient natural explanation, implied directive creation; scripture supported the concept of creation, the idea of progressive succession, and, most important, the terminal creation of man as the apex of the series. The clearest expression of this new synthesis, a synthesis that was used to disprove the charge of atheism in science and to validate the truths that science was unveiling, is reXected in the writings of the Scottish amateur geologist, Hugh Miller, who was himself the most active, the most widely read, and probably the most eVective advocate of this view.2 Within this general interpretation of the pale ontological succes- sion—so easy to reconcile with prevailing belief and so consistent with the known geological facts—geology settled down to a prema- ture old age, eschewing speculation in its zeal to make more speciWc 1 For stimulating, authoritative, although not necessarily compatible accounts of the developments of geology through the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, see Cannon 1960a, 1960b; Eiseley 1958; Gillispie 1951; and Greene 1959. 2 See particularly Miller 1841, 1857. See also the ‘popular’ presentations of Gideon Mantell 1844. Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 19
- 36. the nature ofeach of God’s creations. It was a period, known in the history of every science, of relative calm, of synthesis, of consoli- dation. Through these years of intensive collecting, the assumption of the continued absence of any evidence for man’s antiquity, that is, for the association of his remains with any of those extinct creatures of the past, was the crucial constant that maintained the faith for most progressionists; so delicately balanced and arranged were the various parts of the ideological structure built upon this synthesis of scrip- ture, progress, and geology that the alteration of any part threatened to collapse the whole. The absence of such evidence, however, was in fact a myth, a myth that was nurtured with increasing zeal. English antiquary John Frere’s often-quoted discoveries and lucid interpretation of stone tools and animal fossils (Frere 1800) had occurred in the last years of the eighteenth century; but they came too early to introduce even a jarring note into a system that had not yet been constructed. Thus, unexplainable and unexplained, they remained ignored. With in- creasing palaeontological activity, however, particularly in geological deposits of more recent origin, such evidence occurred at an accel- erating and alarming rate. From the cave earths and from the gravel terraces, those leavings of some prior catastrophe, the remnants of man were exposed. One of the most ardent of the new geologists, Englishman William Buckland, had examined the remains of a human skeleton in Paviland Cave (Buckland 1822) but was quick to explain it away as that of a cour- tesan to the soldiers of a Roman camp nearby. But already, as he reviewed the early evidence from the cave explorations of Europe in his Reliquiae Diluvianae (Buckland 1824), he was able to record at least seven additional instances in which human bones had occurred in circumstances suggesting their high antiquity; but their associ- ations with extinct fauna were, he argued, fortuitous: ‘the human bones are not of the same antiquity with those of the antediluvian animals that occur in the same caves with them’ (ibid. 169).3 3 For the signiWcance of Buckland’s cave researches, which caused something of a sensation at the time of their publication, see Edinburgh Review 1823, and North 1942. 20 Jacob W. Gruber
- 37. In the 1820s,at Kent’s Hole (or Kent’s Cavern) in Devon, southern Britain, local priest Father MacEnery satisWed himself of the contem- poraneity of chipped stone implements and the remains of extinct fauna that he had found together below the stalagmite of the cave’s Xoor (MacEnery 1859; W. Pengelly 1869); but Buckland in person, and Cuvier by reputation, persuaded him that both his observations and his inferences were in error.4 In the 1830s, in the previously undisturbed deposits of the Belgian caverns near Liège, under circumstances of incredible diYculty, med- ical doctor and burgeoning geologist Philippe Charles Schmerling uncovered human remains in direct association with what had come to be a predictable cave fauna. Against the attacks and ridicule of his associates, forced to defend his own integrity as an excavator, he could only maintain that time alone would prove the correctness of his assertions that man had existed at the time the caves were Wlled with the mud and fossils they contained (Schmerling 1833–4: ii. 179). And the similar discoveries by Marcel de Serres, Christol, Tournal, and others in the caves of southern France during the 1820s were widely quoted, only to be questioned and repudiated.5 The most famous of these early discoverers of man’s antiquity was the French customs oYcial and amateur antiquary, Jacques Boucher de Perthes, who lived long enough to see his views vindicated. Active in the Société d’Émulation of the town of Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme River, Boucher de Perthes became interested in the curious chipped Xint implements, or haches which were found in 4 Kent’s Hole or Cavern, at Torquay, is perhaps the most famous of the fossil- bearing caves in England and it had long been known and sporadically plundered (W. Pengelly 1868). Moreover, it did supply evidence to support the view of man’s contemporaneity with extinct fauna. MacEnery, the most persistent and careful of the early workers at Kent’s Hole, did suggest such an association but was never able to commit himself fully to such a view in the face of Buckland’s caution regarding the possibilities of excavation errors and/or later intrusions. His conclusions, therefore, as posthumously published by Vivian (MacEnery 1859) and Pengelly (W. Pengelly 1869) were equivocal and do not support the martyrdom granted him by his later admirers. For an interesting controversy over MacEnery’s role, see Howorth 1901, 1902; Hunt 1902; and Watson 1902. 5 While the data were widely known, the interpretations followed the pattern established by Buckland in his Reliquiae (Buckland 1824) of disassociating for one reason or another the human materials from the fossils with which they were associated. See e.g. Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 1834, for a rebuttal of de Serres’s claims for the antiquity of man in France. Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 21
- 38. the Somme gravels.These were potential proof of the reality of an antediluvian human race of whose existence Boucher des Perthes had been convinced on logical grounds since 1838, when he wrote: I have glimpsed . . . for a long time that antediluvian race and during all these years have anticipated the joy which I would feel when in these terraces which geology has so often declared to be barren and anterior to man, I would Wnally Wnd the proof of the existence of that man, or in default of his bones, a trace of his works. (Boucher de Perthes 1857) From his Wrst discoveries in 1840, Boucher de Perthes pressed his enquiries and his hypothesis with a good-natured tenacity that resisted the defamation and ridicule of his Parisian colleagues. His extensively illustrated Antiquités celtiques et antediluviennes, although covering the whole range of French prehistory, included the Wrst extensive support for the existence of man as a contemporary of the extinct fauna, whose remains were being discovered, with an almost monotonous regularity, in both the open gravel terraces and in the stalagmite-covered cave earths. Although he was convinced of the validity of his position by concepts that were, even then, out- moded, the persistence of his advocacy and his own longevity served to cast him in the role of the prophet of man’s prehistory.6 Properly interpreted, these accumulating data, by thrusting man back into a palaeontological past, would have gone far to demolish the carefully raised structure that was British geology in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In the excitement following the later documentation of man’s antiquity and, I suspect, as a by-product of the attempt to maintain the developing reputation for objectivity and impersonality in sci- ence, there was a tendency to regard these earlier discoveries as so obscure as to have gone unnoticed by those who might have inter- preted them correctly. This was not the case. 6 As is the case with MacEnery, subsequent events and commentators tended to distort the actual relationship of Boucher de Perthes’s work to the times. There can be no doubt as to the value of the tenacity with which he pressed the claims to antiquity of his implements and of the men who made them. His conclusions as well as the discoveries upon which they were based were closely related to his own wide-ranging antiquarian interests, the work of the French cave-explorers of the 1820s and 1830s, and the diluvial concepts that they tended to support (see Aufrère 1936, 1940; Meunier 1875). 22 Jacob W. Gruber
- 39. Still a youngman with his Principles of Geology only recently published, Lyell had visited the Belgian caves in which Schmerling was breaking both his body and heart; but, puzzled over the evidence, he could only sympathize with the diYculty of the problem. To Gideon Mantell, he wrote (Lyell 1881: i. 401–2) in 1833: I saw. . . at Liège the collection of Dr. Schmerling, who in three years has, by his own exertions . . . cleared out some twenty caves untouched by any previous searcher, and has Wlled a truly splendid museum. He numbers already thrice the number of fossil cavern mammalia known when Buckland wrote his ‘Idola specus’. . . But envy him not—you can imagine what he feels at being far from a metropolis which can aVord him sympathy; and having not one congenial soul at Liège, and none who take any interest in his discoveries save the priests—and what kind they take you may guess more especially as he has found human remains in breccia, embedded with extinct species, under circumstances far more diYcult to get over than I have previously heard of. (my italics) The evidence from Kent’s Hole was common knowledge, as were the discoveries from the French caves, and their discoverers’ interpretations. Nor did the discoveries from the Somme Valley (Boucher de Perthes 1847; 1857) go unnoticed or unchampioned. Boucher de Perthes engaged in an extensive correspondence with geologists and antiquarians throughout Europe; and he took every available oppor- tunity to send copies of his Antiquités celtiques et antediluviennes to anyone to whom it might have the slightest interest.7 Darwin wrote to Lyell (Darwin 1887: iii. 15) in 1863 that he ‘had looked at his [Boucher de Perthes’s] book many years ago, and am ashamed to think that I concluded the whole was rubbish!’ Boucher de Perthes had sent the British Archaeological Association ‘a quantity of Celtic antiquities in Xint discovered by him in the environs of Abbeville . . . some of which he assigns to an antediluvian date’. The Association was to have discussed these discoveries, but apparently never did 7 Thus a letter dated 9 December 1857, from Robert Fitch to Ackerman, the secretary of the Society of Antiquaries: ‘I have received a letter from my friend Mr. C. Roach Smith, informing me that M. Boucher de Perthes, was about sending some copies of two antiquarian works to your care, one of which he had kindly presented to the Norfolk & Norwich Archaeological Society’ (Society of Antiquaries Correspondence). Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 23
- 40. (Literary Gazette 1849).Roach-Smith, a remarkable English archae- ologist and one of the more ardent of Boucher de Perthes’s sup- porters in England wrote to him on 11 April 1850 (Boucher de Perthes Correspondence) that ‘Dr. Gideon Mantell, one of our Wrst geologists, sent to me yesterday to borrow your Antiquités Celtiques to lecture on or refer to in one of his lectures’; and on 26 November 1851, he wrote ‘I expect from Dr. Hume of Liverpool a copy of his paper in which he comments favourably on your ‘‘Antiquités Celtiques’’. . . Dr. Hume has asked me if I thought you would like to be a member of the Lancashire and Cheshire Historical Society. I have written in the aYrmative’ (ibid.).8 Another English archaeologist, James Yates, wrote on 12 February 1850 (ibid.), ‘I have not seen the Dean of Westminster [Buckland] since I sent him your Antiquités Celtiques.’ Thus, whatever attitudes particular individuals may have entertained with reference to the work of Boucher de Perthes, both man and his work were known and discussed in England. As was the case with Kent’s Hole, however, it was the ‘amateurs’ and the archaeologists who tended to support him and the ‘professionals’ and geologists who opposed him. It was not therefore, that these important data were unknown, or that information concerning them was poorly distributed. Rather, they were too well known and their advocates were too enthusiastic. Consequently all such evidence was examined with extremes of scientiWc caution and criticism and unnecessarily rejected as, at best, not proven. The net eVect of such caution, laudable as it may be in any abstract judgement of science as an activity, was that with the authority of Cuvier, as perpetuated by Buckland, it could be maintained that: 8 A note from Roach-Smith, dated 31 January 1852, says, ‘The people of Liverpool will elect you into their Society’ (ibid.). A footnote in Boucher de Perthes 1857 suggests that Dr A. Hume published in Liverpool in 1851 a memoir entitled Stone Period ‘where a part of the work of M. Boucher de Perthes 1847 was translated and his Wgures reproduced’. The British Museum does not have a record of this publication nor have 1 been able to trace it elsewhere. The clustering of these events in the years immediately after 1849 and the inclusion of a slip in my volume of Boucher de Perthes 1847 that reads ‘Cet ouvrage, imprimé en 1847, n’a pu, en raison des circonstances, être publié qu’en 1849’, indicate that despite the date of 1847 on the title page, this volume was not distributed until 1849; its publication date should therefore be the later date. 24 Jacob W. Gruber
- 41. The only evidencethat has yet been collected upon this subject [the an- tiquity of man] is negative; but as far as this extends, no conclusion is more fully established than the important fact of the total absence of any vestiges of the human species throughout the entire series of geological formations. Had the case been otherwise, there would indeed have been great diYculty in reconciling the early and extended periods which have been assigned to the extinct races of animals with our received chronology. On the other hand, the fact of no human remains having as yet been found in conjunction with those of extinct animals, may be alleged in conWrmation of the hy- pothesis that these animals lived and died before the creation of man. (Buckland 1837: i. 103) Still later, the world of the 1850s, secure now in its traditional faith in revelation and in its new-found allegiance to science, could echo the heartfelt and poetic expression that Hugh Miller gave of the com- patibility between these two sources of truth: It may be safely stated . . . that that ancient record in which man is repre- sented as the last born of creation, is opposed by no geological fact; and that if, according to Chalmers, ‘the Mosaic writings do not Wx the antiquity of the globe’, they at least do Wx—making allowance, of course, for the varying estimates of the chronologer—‘the antiquity of the human species’. The great column of being, with its base set in the sea, and inscribed, like some old triumphal pillar, with many a strange form—at once hieroglyphic and Wgure—bears, as the ornately sculptured capital, which imparts beauty and Wnish to the whole, reasoning, responsible man. There is surely a very wonderful harmony manifested in that nice sequence in which the inverte- brates—the Wshes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged.9 (Miller 1857: 132–3) Rising above the voices of those whose interests introduced a some- times strident note into their advocacy of the new palliative, was the clear and measured tone of Lyell’s authority. Although no progres- sionist himself, he was Wrm in his view as he disposed one after another, of the claims for man’s antiquity, that ‘we have every reason 9 The chapter from which this portion is quoted was delivered as a lecture before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1853. Miller committed suicide on Christmas Eve, 1856. Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 25
- 42. to infer thatthe human race is extremely modern, even when com- pared to the larger number of species now our contemporaries in this earth’ (Lyell 1855: 148). Such a recent appearance of mankind, stated with such authority and unanimity by those who constituted the professionals of the day, negated any possibility of the contempor- aneity of man with any of those exciting forms that had been turning up in the cave deposits and in the gravels of the post-Pliocene, and whose existence immediately antedated the last of the earth’s great revolutions that sealed oV, so to speak, the human epoch and its occupants, from the organic events of the past. Without reference to the scientiWc merits of the question, or to the evidence adduced for the support of its solution, this response to the problem of man’s past—as well as to his relationship with the organic world as a whole—in a world that had quite suddenly become almost inconceivably old, was man’s last refuge in the search for his unique- ness and the best hope for the maintenance of his divinity.10 The defences constructed to protect his own dignity were suYcient to repel, for half a century, the occasional assaults of questionable associations of human implements with extinct mammalia; but they fell, at last and in some disorder, before the force of the un- anticipated evidence from Brixham Cave in southern Britain. The men immediately responsible for the discoveries at Brixham Cave, discoveries which were to initiate a revolution, were Hugh 10 It should be noted, that by the 1840s and 1850s comparative anatomy was making it increasingly diYcult to draw clear-cut and unmistakable distinctions between species which had heretofore seemed to occupy discrete steps on the pro- gressionist scale of being. It is highly possible that it was the threat of the elimination of clear-cut distinctions, particularly between man and the anthropoid apes that led Richard Owen (1859) to stress man’s uniqueness as the occupant of the mammalian subclass Archencephala. Because I am concerned here with the geological path that led to the recognition of man’s antiquity, I do not refer to the interesting developments in comparative anatomy in particular and in zoology in general that tended to destroy the concept of man’s biological separateness and uniqueness, a line of development that culminated in T. H. Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) whose signiWcance in the area of man’s biological aYnities matched that of Brixham Cave in the area of his temporal or palaeontological relations. It must be realized, however, that the two paths were, for the most part, quite separate, converging only occasion- ally. Within the scientiWc milieu of the period, the problem of man’s antiquity in a geological sense could be and was quite separate from that of man’s zoological place in nature. It was the destruction of this kind of separatism in the whole domain of natural history that was one of the primary contributions of ‘Darwinism’. 26 Jacob W. Gruber
- 43. Falconer, trained inmedicine but active as both botanist and palaeontologist, William Pengelly, a provincial schoolteacher, and Joseph Prestwich, wine merchant. These men are interesting symbols of the ferment that was altering the whole substance of nineteenth- century natural science.11 Pengelly and Prestwich were both amateurs in the sense that, like most of their co-workers, they lacked formal training in science and were able to ‘geologize’ only during those scant hours stolen from their more mundane pursuits.12 They formed part of that large and enthusiastic body for whose works John Herschel (1830: 15–16) had written the justiWcation: The highest degrees of worldly prosperity, are so far from being incompatible with them [scientiWc researches] that they supply additional advantages for their pursuits . . . They may be enjoyed, too, in the intervals of the most active business; and the calm and dispassionate interest with which they Wll the mind renders them a most delightful retreat from the agitations and dissen- sions of the world, and from the conXict of passions, prejudices, and interests in which the man of business Wnds himself continually involved. Their heroes were, during these maturing decades of natural science, the leaders of geology—the Lyells, Murchisons, Owens, and Buck- lands—whose extensive publications and commanding positions provided them with the authority of intellectual command. Although Pengelly and Prestwich were exceptional in their command of the Weld, there were many of their kind whose primarily descriptive articles Wll the geological journals of the period. These were initially collectors and observers whose more limited contributions provided the factual bases for the broader syntheses of their leaders. DiYdent and often practical, they were in tune with their times; and in their caution they were often led to a conservatism which maintained 11 All three men have been memorialized in a fashion. Both Prestwich and Pengelly are the subjects of the typical nineteenth-century biographical memoir: Pengelly’s by his daughter (H. Pengelly 1897) and Prestwich’s by his wife (G. Prestwich 1899). Both are long tributes that conceal more than they inform. Falconer’s biographical legacy, unfortunately for so interesting a Wgure in the history of nineteenth-century science, is a collection of his works, most of them previously unpublished, prefaced by a brief biographical notice, a respectful and judicious treatment that adds little to the knowledge of the man (Falconer 1868). 12 In 1874, however, Prestwich, at 62 years old, was appointed Professor of Geology at Oxford; but this was little more than an honorary post. Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 27
- 44. theoretical views whosefashion had faded under the weight of new evidence and of the theories to which they gave rise.13 When they did speculate, it was often on the basis of insuYcient or provincially circumscribed data or upon general assumptions no longer valid. Falconer was, however, another sort. Like many of the period, he had been led to a career in natural science through the comparative anatomy of a medical background, and through the scientiWc spirit still perceptible at the University of Edinburgh, where he had trained. He was one of the new men of nineteenth-century natural science for whom observation was more important than theorizing, but who saw, in a revived empiricism, a virgin Weld for the collection of the data that would eventually disclose the secrets of nature. He was more a romantic than a rationalist, and he approached his work more often with the zeal of the former than with the cold logic of the latter. Each new discovery moved him with such an excitement to pass it on and share it, that he was never able to complete his own continuously projected work. The literature of Brixham Cave is relatively scant. Death, timidity, and delay so postponed the publication of the results of the year- long excavation that by the time the Wnal report at last appeared (J. A. Prestwich 1873), this parent of prehistory had already been devoured, both in interest and in importance, by its more spectacular oVspring. Nevertheless the public bickering over priority of discovery, and Pengelly’s invaluable manuscript journal of the excavations,14 make 13 Thus, Boucher de Perthes, often regarded as a pioneer in if not the founder of prehistoric studies, interpreted his evidences from the Somme gravels within a diluvial theory that had been completely rejected—and on suYcient grounds—by the ‘professional’ geologists of his time. 14 Now in the possession of the Museum of the Torquay Natural History Society, to whose generosity I am indebted for making the manuscript available through its secretary Mr Wilfrid T. Wiatt. It is impossible to say when this ‘journal’ was written. It is in Pengelly’s handwriting and Wlls thirteen composition books, of which the second is missing. On the basis of internal evidence, I do not think that it represents a running account written during the actual operations nor is it a series of Weld notes. Rather, it appearsto be the occasional collection and, perhapsabstraction of Weldjournal notes and the letters relating to the excavations combined into one connected narrative. While some of the parts appear to have been written while the researches were in progress, the whole seems to have been completed several months after the conclusion of the excav- ations. Part of the inspiration for the journal was undoubtedly the already developing, in 1860, conXicts over priority of discovery; and, in part, Pengelly hoped to use this edited version of his notes as the basis for his Wnal report to the Royal Society of London. 28 Jacob W. Gruber
- 45. it possible toreconstruct the short history during which man’s antiquity was, for the Wrst time, substantiated beyond serious doubt or question, through the unlooked for discovery of a few Xint implements in direct and indisputable association with the bones of the great extinct mammalia of the Pleistocene. Like most signiWcant clues to man’s past, the cavern on Windmill Hill, at Brixham, overlooking the town of Torquay in south Devon, England, was discovered accidentally. And, signiWcantly for the history of archaeology, it was explored by geologists with a view towards the solution of certain geological problems. There is no evidence from the contemporary documents that its signiWcance for the ‘antiquity of man question’ was at all anticipated. As Falconer pointed out, in his request for support from the Geological Society of London, scientiWc interest in cavern research had virtually disappeared since the excitement that followed Buckland’s publication of his Reliquiae Diluvianae. So thor- ough and so comprehensive had been Buckland’s research, and so conclusive and authoritative his conclusions, that it seemed nothing more could be added beyond what was contained in that scientiWc tour de force. The results of Buckland’s inXuence were that all caves were: Popularly regarded as containing the debris of the same mammalian fauna, and as having been overlaid with their ochreous loam by the same common agency at the same period. The contents of the diVerent caverns were thus considered as being in a great measure duplicates of one another, and the exceptional presence of certain forms in one case, and their absence in another, were regarded more in the light of local accidents than as signiWcant for any general source of diVerence. Hence it followed that more attention was paid to the extrication of the bones, and to securing good specimens, than to a record of their relative association and the order of succession in which they occurred. The remains have been, in some instances, huddled together in provincial collections—the contents of Wve or six distinct caves, without a discriminative mark to indicate out of which particular cavern they came. Another consequence has been, that being regarded in the light of duplicates, the contents of some of the most important and classical English caverns have been dispersed piecemeal; and so far as regards them the evil is beyond remedy. (Falconer 1868: ii. 487–8) During the 1850s, however, with the increasing anatomical discrim- ination of the expanded number of mammalian species and with the Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man 29
- 46. Exploring the Varietyof Random Documents with Different Content
- 47. We also hadto get Garvice’s books, and also Oppenheim’s. But even at the beginning of our venture, we were by no means limited in opportunity to authors of any particular class. It was quite possible that one man in a ward would be reading, say, Nat Gould’s ‘Jockey Jack’—a great favourite—and the man in the next bed would be reading Shakespeare, or ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ or Shelley, or Meredith, Conrad, or the Encyclopædia. We found, in fact, so many different kinds of minds and upbringings, that we could never have remembered without the aid of a note-book what each man wanted. So after various experiments, this became our system. We divided the wards between us, and went round with our note-book to each bedside, found out if our soldier cared to read, and, if he had no suggestion to make, found out in a vague sort of way, without worrying him, of course, what he would be likely to want—if, indeed, he wanted anything at all. For in some cases the very thought of a book was apparently worse than a bomb. In instances like this, matches and cigarettes or tobacco served as a substitute for literature, and generally speaking as a natural concomitant too! Now and again we have had men who have never learnt to read at all. With one exception, these have invariably been miners. One day our work took on a new phase, the development of which has been the source of great satisfaction, both to readers and librarians. We were asked for a book on high explosives. We made inquiries about the one in question, and found it cost eighteen shillings. That seemed a good deal to spend on one book for one person, but on mentioning this matter to our doctor in charge, we were told to go ahead and buy it, and also anything else that seemed to be wanted. This one incident fired us with the idea to find out what subjects the men were interested in, what had been their occupation before the war, or their plans for the future. And from that moment the work of the librarians became tenfold more interesting, and in some degree constructive. We were asked for books on paper-making, printing, cabinet- making, engineering, marine engineering, veterinary work, Sheffield
- 48. plate, old furniture,organic and inorganic chemistry, fish-curing, coal-mining, counterpoint, languages, meteorology, electricity, submarines, aeroplanes, flowers, trees, gardening, forestry, the Stone Age, painting and drawing, violin making, architecture, and so on. The fish-curing instance was particularly interesting. The soldier in question was from Nova Scotia, and his father’s business was fish- curing. He was anxious to learn the English methods, and gain all the information he could during his sojourn in England, before he was invalided out of the army and returned to his home. We have therefore made it our business to supply these various needs, and also to provide any weekly papers bearing on the different subjects in which the men are interested. Our Department could not, of course, be always buying costly books, but with the aid of our subscription to Mudie’s, and by the help of friends who have come to the rescue and lent their valuable books to us for the special purpose which we have unfolded to them, we have been able so far to meet all demands; and this part of our work is increasing all the time. The Sheffield plate book lent us by a generous antiquary was a perfect godsend to one of our crippled men. His business was that of a second-hand dealer, and he said it was a rare chance to get hold of that book and make copious notes from it which would be invaluable to him afterwards. Turning aside from technical subjects to literature in general, I would like to say that although we have not ever attempted to force good books on our soldiers, we have of course taken great care to place them within their reach. And it is not an illusion to say that when the men once begin on a better class of book, they do not as a rule return to the old stuff which formerly constituted their whole range of reading. My own impression is that they read rubbish because they have had no one to tell them what to read. Stevenson, for instance, has lifted many a young soldier in our hospital on to a higher plane of reading whence he has looked down with something like scorn—which is really very funny—on his former favourites. For that group of readers, ‘Treasure Island’ has been a discovery in more senses than one, and to the librarians a boon unspeakable.
- 49. We have had,however, a large number of men who in any case care for good literature, and indeed would read nothing else. Needless to say, we have had special pleasure in trying to find them some book which they would be sure to like and which was already in our collection, or else in buying it, and thus adding to our stock. The publishers, too, have been most generous in sending us any current book which has aroused public interest and on which we have set our hearts. For we have tried to acquire not only standard works, but books of the moment bearing on the war, and other subjects too. The following are items from two or three of our order books. The order books have been chosen at random, but the items are consecutive; and the list will give some idea of the nature of our pilgrimages from one bedside to another bedside, and from one ward to another. One of Nat Gould’s novels; Regiments at the Front; Burns’s Poems; A book on bird life; ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’; Strand Magazine; Strand Magazine; Wide World Magazine; The Spectator; A scientific book; Review of Reviews; ‘By the Wish of a Woman’ (Marchmont); one of Rider Haggard’s; Marie Corelli; Nat Gould; Rider Haggard; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Good detective story; Something to make you laugh; Strand Magazine; Adventure story; ‘Tale of Two Cities’; ‘Gil Blas’; Browning’s Poems; Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’; Sexton Blake; ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’; Nat Gould; Wide World Magazine; Pearson’s Magazine; ‘Arabian Nights’; Jack London; Shakespeare; Nat Gould; ‘The Encyclopædia’; Rex Beach; Wm. Le Queux; Strand Magazine; Nat Gould; Something in the murder line; Country Life; The Story Teller Magazine; one of Oppenheim’s novels; ‘The Crown of Wild Olive’; ‘Kidnapped’; Nat Gould; Shakespeare; Nat Gould; Silas Hocking; Oppenheim; Le Queux; Nat Gould; Nat Gould; Jack London; ‘Handy Andy’; ‘Kidnapped’; ‘Treasure Island’; Book about rose growing; ‘Montezuma’s Daughter’ (Rider Haggard); ‘Prisoner of Zenda’; Macaulay’s Essays; ‘The Magnetic North’ (Elizabeth Robins); Nat Gould; Sexton Blake; Modern High Explosives; ‘Dawn’ (Rider Haggard); ‘Wild Animals’; Book on horse-
- 50. breaking; ‘Radiography’; ‘Freckles’(by Gene Stratton-Porter); ‘The Blue Lagoon’; ‘Caged Birds’; ‘The Corsican Brothers’; ‘Sherlock Holmes’; French Dictionary; Kipling; ‘Mysticism’; Nat Gould; ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; ‘Mystery of Cloomber’ (Conan Doyle); and so on. These are, of course, only a few items. I should say that on the whole, and leaving out entirely books on technical and special subjects, the authors most frequently asked for by the average soldier are: Nat Gould, Charles Garvice, Wm. Le Queux, Rider Haggard, Guy Boothby, Oppenheim, Rex Beach, Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli, Joseph and Silas Hocking, Jack London, Dickens, Mrs. Henry Wood, Kipling (whose ‘Barrack Room Ballads’ they learnt by heart), Dumas, Ian Hay, Baroness Orczy, and Hornung’s ‘Raffles.’ And very favourite books are those dealing with wild animals and their habits, with ferrets, rats, and birds, and all stories of adventure and travel, and of course detective stories. The New Zealanders and Australians have always asked for books on England, and also for Bushranger stories, also for their own poets. And even before we began to pay special attention to technical subjects, all books on aeroplanes, submarines, electricity, and wireless telegraphy were much in request. An Encyclopædia was so much asked for that we wrote to Mr. Dent, who most kindly sent us the twelve volumes of the ‘Everyman’s Encyclopædia.’ And they are always ‘out.’ Shakespeare holds his own surprisingly and encouragingly well. The Society novel is never read, and we weeded it out to make room for another class of book which would be in demand. We have been sometimes astonished by the kind of book asked for by some man who seemed to us a most unpromising reader. The puzzle has been solved when we learnt that he had seen it on the cinematograph. ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ was one of the books asked for in these circumstances, and our soldier was literally riveted to it until he had finished it, when he passed it on to his neighbour as a sort of ‘real find.’ Similarly, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ was asked for, and after that several volumes of Shakespeare were taken to
- 51. that bedside. Thisexperience certainly shows that the cinema has a great possibility of doing good as well as harm. The magazines most in demand are The Strand, The Windsor, Pearson’s, The Wide World, The Red, and a few others. But some of our readers have refused to be interested in any magazines except their own pet ones. One man, for instance, confined himself entirely to Blackwood’s. He proudly preferred an old number of Maga to a current number of any other magazine on earth. A second man remained loyal to the Review of Reviews, and a third to Land and Water. Another was never satisfied with anything except The Nineteenth Century. Others have asked only for wretched little rags which one would wish to see perish off the face of the earth. But as time has gone on, these have been less and less asked for, and their place has been gradually taken by the Sphere, the Graphic, the Tatler, the Illustrated London News, and the Sketch—another instance of a better class of literature being welcomed and accepted if put within easy reach. In our case this has been made continuously possible by friends who have given subscriptions for both monthly and weekly numbers, and by others who send in their back numbers in batches, and by the publishers, who never fail us. John Bull deserves a paragraph all to himself. The popularity of his paper is truly remarkable. The average soldier looks upon it as a sort of gospel; and new arrivals from the trenches are cheered up at once by the very sight of the well-known cover. Even if they are too ill to read it, they like to have it near them ready for the moment when returning strength gives them the incentive to take even a glance at some of its pages. We have found that men who have not naturally been readers have acquired the habit of reading in our Hospital, and there have been many instances of men who have become out-patients asking for permission to continue to use the library. It has been one of our great pleasures to see old friends strolling into the recreation room and picking out for themselves some book by an author whom they have learnt to know and appreciate. Another gratifying feature of the
- 52. work has beenthe anxiety of many of our readers to have a book waiting for them after an operation, so that as soon as possible they may begin to read it and forget some of their pains and sufferings. In many instances the author or the subject has been deliberately chosen beforehand. Our experiences, in fact, have tended to show that a library department organised and run by people who have some knowledge of books might prove to be a useful asset in any hospital, both military and civil, and be the means of affording not only amusement and distraction, but even definite education, induced of course, not insisted on. To obtain satisfactory results it would seem, however, that even a good and carefully chosen collection of books of all kinds does not suffice. In addition, an official librarian is needed who will supply the initiative, which in the circumstances is of necessity lacking, and whose duty it is to visit the wards, study the temperaments, inclinations, and possibilities of the patients, and thus find out by direct personal intercourse what will amuse, help, stimulate, lift—and heal.
- 53. LOST HORSES. A monthor so after the traitor Maritz had made his flamboyant proclamation in German South-West Africa, a small body of mounted Union troops was operating in a district which may be described as ‘somewhere near Upington.’ Probably such secrecy of places and names is not at all necessary, but it lends an appropriate military flavour to the small events I describe. I may go so far as to say that the setting I have provided is fictitious, though similar events did, no doubt, occur in the operations against Maritz and Kemp and their heroes. The characters of the roan horse and of the boy Frikkie are true to life, and the small adventures did occur much as described, but in another country in South Africa and upon a different occasion. Accept the story as fiction, not as history; it will at any rate serve to throw a light upon one of the aspects of the fighting in that dry land, and it illustrates the close relationship between horse and man in that country of long distances and sparse population and infrequent water-holes. The conditions are the absolute antithesis of those in Flanders and the trenches. The risk of losing his riding or pack animals is constantly present to the veld traveller. Fortunately it is seldom the cause of anything more troublesome than a temporary inconvenience, but there are occasions when serious hardships result, the loss of valuable time or of your animals, or risk to your own life. In most cases the loss of your beasts is due merely to the fact that they have strayed. They have, as a rule, either followed the lead of some restless animal who is making back for his stable, or else they have wandered away in search of grass or water. A horse is less hardy than his hybrid half-brother, and more the slave of his belly. Thirst and hunger pinch him at once, and he is quick in search of comfort; he is therefore more likely to stop and
- 54. suffer capture atthe first patch of good grass he comes to. His superficial character, moreover, generally affords some indication both of the reason he has strayed and the direction he has taken. There are, however, a few horses who are inveterate and troublesome wanderers; they are generally old animals whose accumulated experience has developed a cunning foreign to their normal character. Such animals often possess an irritating facility for choosing the most inconvenient time to stray and the most unlikely direction to go. If horses are the most frequent offenders, their sins in this respect are seldom serious. In my own experience mules are more liable to travel back along the road they have come than horses; they are more creatures of habit, their memory is more retentive, and they have greater natural intelligence. When a mule has acquired the habit of absenting himself from duty he is a perpetual trouble. The most malignant form of this disease occurs when the beast has developed an insatiable longing for one particular place, a definite goal from which nothing will turn him. This haven of his constant desire is generally the place where he was born, or where he passed the pleasant days of his absurd youth. There are traits in most horses which, in conjunction with this foundation of congenital simplicity, go to make ‘character.’ Men who have dealt with horses in the less frequented parts of the earth know this well. They will remember one animal who had in a highly developed degree that instinctive correctness of demeanour which can best be described as good manners; a second had a heart like a lion and checked at nothing; another was a prey to an incurable nervousness; while yet another was just simply mean. These mean horses are a perpetual menace; you never know when they will let you down. Sometimes they are clearly actuated by malice; sometimes, however, there is a subtle quality and timeliness in their apparent stupidity which gives you a horrid suspicion that you’ve been had, and that your horse is more of a rogue than a fool. Such an animal is always an old horse, never a young one.
- 55. I am notquite clear as to what a scout should look like. The typical scout of the North American Indian days, as exemplified in the person of Natty Bumpo, wore fringed buckskin and moccasins and coon-skin cap, while Texas Bill and his vivid companions had a more picturesque costume still, in which great silver-studded saddles and jingling spurs and monstrous revolvers bore a conspicuous part. I must confess that my own nine sportsmen were scrubby-looking fellows compared to their picturesque predecessors at the game. (The khaki trousers issued by an administration which was always more practical than picturesque do not lend themselves, in this generation at any rate, to romance.) But they were a hard and useful lot, much sunburnt, and with gnarled, scarred hands. Deerslayer himself probably could not have taught them much about their own veld craft. Every one was South African born; three of them were younger sons of loyal Boer farmers. One was a coloured boy, a quiet, capable fellow. He was with us nominally as a sort of groom, but his civil manners and extraordinary capacity soon won him an accepted place in the scouts; though he rode and ate with us, he always sat a little apart in camp. He had spent three or four years up country, where I had first come across him in fact, and had shot some amount of big game; he was excellent on spoor and had a wonderful eye for country, and I really think he was the quickest man on and off a horse, and the quickest and most brilliant shot I ever saw. He stood on the roster as Frederick Collins, but was never known by any other name than Frikkie. The commandant of the rather nondescript commando, which was officially described, I believe, as a composite regiment, had a sound idea of the value of a few competent and well-mounted scouts, and had done us very well in the matter of horse. We had been ‘on commando’ now for nearly five weeks, and had got to know our animals pretty well. During the confusion and changes of the first fortnight I had got rid of a dozen horses I saw would be of no use for our work, though suitable, no doubt, for slower troop duty, and by a cunning process of selection had got together a very serviceable lot, with four spare animals to carry kit and water on the
- 56. longer trips awayfrom the main body. Your spirited young things, though well enough to go courting on, are apt to get leg-weary and drop condition too soon on steady work, and all my mob were aged and as hard as nails. I will describe one or two of them presently. Things were getting a little exciting about that time. Three rebel commandos, or rather bands, were known to be in the neighbourhood, and it was essential to find out what their strength was and who their leaders were. There was not much reason to fear attack, for they were not well found in either guns or ammunition, and their ragamuffin cavalry were concerned to avoid and not invite a stand-up engagement. Rapidity of action was essential to the loyal troops, for the longer the rebellion dragged on the more risk there was of it spreading. It was necessary to find out at once the actual movements of these bands, and the best way of doing so was to keep tally of the water-holes. Men can, if necessary, carry water for themselves, but horses, especially those from the moist high veld of the Transvaal, must have water regularly or they go to pieces very quickly in that dry, hot land. And so the remote and forgotten pit at Ramib had suddenly become of importance, and I had been told to send two men to examine it at once. It lay within the rocky belt which came down south of the Orange River somewhat to our right; it was supposed to be twenty miles away, but it might prove five miles less or ten miles more. It was known to have held water fifteen months before, and our business was to find out if it still held water, how long that water would be likely to last, and if any of the rebels had been to it recently. No one in the column was aware of its exact location, but I myself knew enough of those parts to guess roughly where it must lie. I decided to take one man and a pack-horse, and to take the patrol myself. No native guide was available, and the Colonel did not, for obvious reasons, care to make use of any of the few local Boers who carried on a wretched existence as farmers in that barren country. My own horse was a big bay, an uncomfortable beast, but capable of covering much ground; like many big men, he had little mental
- 57. elasticity and novices. Frikkie had an unassuming bay of ordinary manners and capacity, and with a natural aptitude for routine and a military life. The third horse was a king of his class. He did not belong to the scouts, but I had borrowed him to carry the pack on that patrol. He was mean all through; in colour a sort of skewbald roan, and in character an irreclaimable criminal. He had a narrow chest, weedy white legs, and a pale shifty eye; he was very free with his heels, and an inveterate malingerer. He had never carried a pack before and we were prepared for trouble, for his malevolent spirit had already acquired a wide reputation. The patrol left the column a little before sunset, after a windless, baking day. The horses were in excellent fettle. The roan had given some trouble with the pack, but before he could throw himself down or buck through the lines he was hustled out of camp to an accompaniment of oaths and cheers in two languages. Once away and alone he went quietly, but doubtless with hate in his heart, for his beastly eye was full of gall. Dawn found us hidden on the top of a low stony kopje, the horses tied together among the brown boulders below. It was bitter cold as the light grew, and the sun came up into an empty world. I waited there for half an hour, partly to find any signs of white men, and partly to work out the lay of the land and the probable direction of the pit. Nothing was moving in the whole world. It was clear where the water must be. On the right was the usual barren desert country we had come through during the night, low ridges of stone and shale, and a thin low scrub of milk bush and cactus. On the left the land grew much rougher towards the river; the rocky valleys stretched for miles in that direction. Presently we led the horses down off the kopje, and an hour later saw us looking down at the chain of small holes, still full of good water. I stayed with the hidden horses while Frikkie cut a circle round the pools. There was no sign of life, he reported, only the old sandal spoor of some natives; no horse had been down to the water for weeks, probably for months. We off-saddled in a hidden corner some way from the water, and got a small fire going of thin dry sticks. The horses were given a drink
- 58. and turned loose.It was criminal foolishness not to have hobbled or knee-haltered the roan, for ten minutes after they were let go Frikkie called out that the horses had completely disappeared. One realised at once that there was no time to be lost. It was probable that the roan had led them away, and that he meant business. The saddles and pack were hurriedly hidden among some rocks with the billy of half-cooked rice, the fire was put out, and we took up the spoor. It was soon evident that the animals were travelling, and were not straying aimlessly in search of feed. The spoor of the discoloured strawberry beast was always in front—his footprints were like his character, narrow and close. Above his tracks came those of Ruby, the police horse, round ordinary hoof-marks, and well shod; my own horse’s immense prints were always last, solid and unmistakable. Mile after mile the tracks led into a rockier and more barren country. What little stunted and thorny scrub there was had not yet come into leaf, and there was no shade and no sign of green anywhere. Ridges of sharp gravel and small kopjes of brown stone alternated with narrow valleys without sign of green or water. In the softer ground of these valleys the spoor was plain and could be followed without any trouble, but on the rocky ridges the tracks became difficult to hold where the horses had separated and wandered about. The trail led eastwards, into a rocky, waterless, and uninhabited country. There was no reason for the roan’s choice but just native malice, for he had come from the west the previous day. Doubtless the main camp would be his ultimate destination, but it seemed apparent that he intended to inflict as deep an injury as he could before he set his sour face again to the west. It was within half an hour of sundown before I came up with the horses, and then only the two bays; the roan’s spoor showed that he had gone on about an hour before. They were standing under a bunch of thorn trees, the only shade they had passed since they were let go that morning. For the last mile or two the tracks, which had become more aimless as the hot afternoon wore on, had turned
- 59. a little tothe north. Probably, as the allegiance of his small following had weakened, the leader’s thoughts had turned to the companionship of the camp, and when they had finally refused to follow him any further he had abandoned the rest of his revenge and had turned frankly for home. We rounded up the two horses and thought of our camp, probably eight miles away in a direct line. Though they were tired and empty they would not be caught, and it was soon evident that they would not be driven either. I will not ask you to follow the dreadful hour which ensued. This crowning flicker of rebellion at the end of a disastrous day nearly broke our hearts. It was well after dark when we finally abandoned the horses in an area of steep rocky ridges and narrow valleys covered with cactus; it was quite impossible to cope with them in the dark in such a country. We reached camp about ten, but were too tired and disappointed to make a fire. A tin of bully-beef, and the mass of opaque jelly which had once been good Patna rice, were the first pleasant incidents of a baking, hungry day. The second day began before dawn with as large a breakfast as we could compass: black coffee, the little bread that was left, and a large quantity of rice. I have seldom eaten a more cheerless meal. Three or four pounds of rice, some coffee, a tin or two of bully, and a little sugar were all that remained to us, and there was no chance of getting more. I must confess that at this stage a tactical error was committed which cost us the long day’s work for nothing. A golden rule where lost animals are concerned is to stick to the spoor, but as I thought it very probable that the horses would turn north and west again during the night and make for their last place of sojourn, I tried to save half a dozen hours by cutting the spoor ahead. It was nearly noon, and a mile or two beyond where the roan had left the others, before it became a certainty that the horses had done the unlikely thing, and had gone either south or further east into the broken country. At that moment they were probably ten miles away. I then did what one should have done at first, and went to the point where we had last seen them. That afternoon was hotter and emptier than the last, and sunset found us on a cold spoor going
- 60. north. We hadwisely brought rice and coffee and water-bags with us that morning, and Frikkie had shot a klipspringer—baboons and klipspringer were the only animals we had seen the last two days. If you suppose that we had used any of the water for washing you are making a mistake, though Heaven knows that we both would have been the better for a bath. We slept on the spoor, and bitter cold it was without blankets; there was not scrub enough for a decent fire. Matters were getting serious. We were then twelve miles from the saddlery and, so far as we knew, the nearest water, and twenty more from the camp. If the horses were not found and caught that day they would have to be abandoned, and we would have to pad the hoof home via the disastrous pools at Ramib. But fortune does not frown for ever; it is a long worm that has no turning. Within an hour of sunrise we came into the quite fresh tracks of the horses crossing their own spoor. Frikkie exclaimed that there were three horses, and an examination showed the narrow tracks of the red horse with the other two; they had not found water and were evidently on their way back to Ramib. We came on to the animals a few minutes afterwards. Except that they were hollow from want of water they were none the worse, and apparently they were not sorry to see us. By the time the sun was in the north they had had a good drink and were finishing the little grain in the pack. Midnight saw us riding into the main camp—only to find it deserted, for the column had marched. The camp was apparently completely empty, and it felt very desolate under a small moon. I expected I would discover a message of some sort for me at sunrise; in the meantime the obvious thing was to keep out of the way, so I went half a mile off into the veld, and the boy and I kept watch by turn until dawn. Nothing moved in or round the camp till near sunrise, when three men rode out of some shale ridges about a mile away on the opposite side, and came down to the water. By the white bands round the left arm—the sign of loyal troops—I knew them for our own men; indeed we had recognised the horse one of them was
- 61. riding. They gaveme the message they had stayed behind to deliver. We were to stay and watch the camp site for three or four days, and to patrol daily some distance to the south-east. The water was important, for it was quite probable that one or other of the rebel commandos would come to it. The men had hidden provisions for us and some grain for the horses; they themselves were to hurry on to the column with our report of the Ramib pits. We rode a few miles along the column spoor with them, and then turned off on some gravelly ground and fetched a compass round back to the place in the shale ridges where the men had slept and where the provisions were. We took no more chances with the strawberry horse; he was closely hobbled. The loss of the animals had been a serious thing, and we were extremely fortunate to have got out of it so easily. It did not lessen the annoyance to realise that it was my own fault for not hobbling the roan, but only a rogue by constitution and habit would have carried his hostility to so dangerous a length. But within a week he was to provide another taste of his quality. This time nothing more serious was involved than the risk of his own loss, for we were never led far from water in so menacing and barren a country as that beyond Ramib. Most of that day was spent in the stony krantz, from which a view could be obtained over the whole dry, grey landscape, and the pools a mile away. In normal times the laagte was frequently used for sheep grazing, but in these days of mobile and ever-hungry commandos the few farmers in the vicinity were grazing their meagre flocks nearer their homesteads. Except for a few wandering Griquas, and possibly a band of ragged rebels on tired horses, it was not likely that our watch would be interrupted. A rough shelter made of the stunted spiny scrub served as a sentry box; the saddles were hidden in a narrow cleft on the lee side of the ridge, and the horses were kept down in the valleys. In the afternoon we saddled up and rode south and east, keeping for the most part to the rough ridges, and overlooking the level
- 62. country along whichour column had come, and which was the natural approach from that side for any body of men having wheeled transport with them. We did not ride for more than an hour, but my glasses showed an empty, treeless world for miles beyond. If the commandos did come our way they would probably trek by night; we should hear them arrive and laager about dawn, and sunrise would have seen us well on our way to our own men. Just at dusk that evening we rode along the lee of the ridge upon which our poor home was. Frikkie was riding the roan. He was leading his own animal, for a single horse could not be left grazing alone, to be picked up, perhaps, by any wandering rebel, or to stray off in search of companionship. When we passed under the highest point of the ridge I stopped and sent Frikkie to the top, for he could spy in both directions from there. I took the led horse from him, and he threw the roan’s reins over the neck to trail on the ground—the accepted instruction to every trained veld horse to stand still. I watched the boy’s slim figure against the sunset sky in the west as he turned about, searching the veld through his binoculars, though it was really getting too dark for prism glasses. He called out that nothing was moving, and presently came lightly down the steep slope in the gathering dusk. As he reached his horse the beast turned his quarters to him and walked away; the boy walked round, but again the horse turned away; and when I put my horse across to check him he lifted his head and trotted off. We knew that we couldn’t catch the beast if his views on the matter did not coincide with ours, so we walked on the half-mile to where the skerm was, thinking the horse would follow up his mates at his leisure. This was a new, but not unexpected, trait in an already depraved character. Some horses, though they are inveterate strayers, are easy to catch when you do come up with them; others are very difficult to catch, though they seldom go more than a mile from the camp; this hectic degenerate apparently combined both these bad habits.
- 63. An hour afterdark the horse had not turned up, though our own reliable animals were knee-haltered and turned loose for a time with their nosebags on as decoys. At dawn he was not visible in any of the shallow valleys we could see to the east of the ridge; and to our surprise and concern he was not in the valley where the water was and where the camp had been. Our own horses were knee-haltered short and let go, and we spent a careful hour examining the margin of the pool, but there was no narrow spoor to show that the roan had been down to drink during the night. I spent the morning with our horses and on the look-out, while the boy cut a wide semicircle round to the south and west of the water. He came in at mid-day, certain that the truant had not gone out in those directions. Then Frikkie took over the sentry work, and I set out to cover the remainder of the circle. I worked methodically along the soft ground of the valleys outside the range of the area already fouled by the spoor of our own animals, and where I would find the roan’s tracks at once. From time to time I climbed one of the low ridges, for the boy was to spread a light- coloured saddle blanket over a prominent rock on the side away from the water as a signal if he saw either the lost horse or anyone approaching from the south, or in case of other danger. Nothing occurred during the long, hot afternoon. That evening, when I got back to camp, I found two Griquas sitting over the coals with Frikkie. They said they were shepherds, and they may have done a little of that congenial work recently, but they looked to me more like sheep-stealers. They were wild people from the Orange River, and I was sure they had never been any sort of farm labourers. However, they were friendly enough and promised help in the morning. The horse had then been without water since the morning of the previous day. He had not strayed away, for at sunset he must have been still within four or five miles of the camp; if he had intended business we would have cut his outgoing spoor during the day. Horses were too valuable in that country and at that time for the loss of even such a three-cornered abomination as the pink horse to be taken lightly.
- 64. Morning showed thatthe horse had not been to the water during the night. He had then been forty-eight hours without water. The only thing was to take up the spoor where the animal had last been seen, and so stick to it till he was found. The Kalahari bushmen have the reputation of being the finest trackers in South Africa, but these two cross-bred Griqua bushmen gave us an incomparable exhibition of skill. I have had some experience of that game, and Frikkie was a master, but these savages astonished us. Inch by inch the spoor was picked out from that of the other animals. No proved mark was abandoned until the next was certified, often only an inch or two away. The only slight help they had was the rare and very faint mark where the trailing reins had touched the ground. The first hundred yards took probably an hour to cover, but when the spoor reached comparatively clean ground the work was easier. At this point Frikkie got the water-bags and some food and joined the bushmen, for it was possible that the horse, driven by thirst, had taken it into his head to travel far during the previous night. Late that evening the trackers returned with the horse. He was emaciated and weak, but otherwise quite well, though for some days his back was tender from the continual ‘sweating’ of the saddle blanket. His spoor showed that he had spent the first night and day wandering about the low ridges and hollows not far from our camp, and that the night before he had commenced to journey away into the empty country to the east. Somewhere about dawn of that third day his trailing reins had hooked up on one of the few bushes in that country strong enough to hold him, and there he was found by the bushmen, the picture of a natural misery, and too dejected to take much notice of his rescuers. Nothing but his own gloomy thoughts had prevented him from going down to the water at any time, or to the companionship of our camp. Thirty-six hours after this we were back with the main column. It is not necessary to add that we were glad to get a bath and a
- 65. generous meal, andthat I took the first opportunity of handing over the parti-coloured strawberry to troop duty. In the first of these two offences it is clear that the white-legged roan was animated by spite. Such malevolence is rare enough, but his second performance is much more remarkable. I offer three alternative explanations. The first is that it was just stupidity. I have the poorest opinion of the intelligence of the horse, as distinct from instinct. It is Professor Lloyd Morgan, I think, who defines instinct as ‘the sum of inherited habits,’ and this may be accepted as a sound definition. Elementary necessity, to say nothing of instinct or intelligence, should have driven him to the water soon after he had obtained his freedom. He could not have forgotten where the water was. If his normal mental process was so dislocated by the fact of the saddle on his back without the presence of the masterful human in it, then he was a fool of the first class. The second solution I offer is that his action was prompted by roguery; for even a very limited intelligence would have warned him that he would be captured if he ventured near either the water or the camp. It may be that when his reins hooked up he was on his way to the free water at Ramib. The third explanation is that he was a little daft. In a long and varied experience of horses I cannot really remember one so afflicted, though I had a pack-mule once that I am certain was a harmless lunatic. You may take your choice of these alternatives; for my part I incline to the second. John Ridd’s rustic wisdom led him to express the opinion, upon the memorable occasion when John Fry was bringing him home from Blundell’s School at Tiverton, that ‘a horse (like a woman) lacks, and is better without, self-reliance.’ R. T. Coryndon.
- 66. ‘THE PROGRESS OFPICKERSDYKE.’ Second Lieutenant William Pickersdyke, sometime quarter-master- sergeant of the ⸺th Battery and now adjutant of a divisional ammunition column, stared out of the window of his billet and surveyed the muddy and uninteresting village street with eyes of gloom. His habitual optimism had for once failed him, and his confidence in the gospel of efficiency had been shaken. For Fate, in the portly guise of his fatuous old colonel, had intervened to balk the fulfilment of his most cherished desire. Pickersdyke had that morning applied for permission to be transferred to his old battery if a vacancy occurred, and the colonel had flatly declined to forward the application. Now one of the few military axioms which have not so far been disproved in the course of this war is the one which lays down that second lieutenants must not argue with colonels. Pickersdyke had left his commanding officer without betraying the resentment which he felt, but in the privacy of his own room, however, he allowed himself the luxury of vituperation. ‘Blooming old woman!’ he said aloud. ‘Incompetent, rusty old dug- out! Thinks he’s going to keep me here running his bally column for ever, I suppose. Selfish, that’s what ’e is—and lazy too.’ In spite of the colonel’s pompous reference to ‘the exigencies of the service,’ that useful phrase which covers a multitude of minor injustices, Pickersdyke had legitimate cause for grievance. Nine months previously, when he had been offered a commission, he had had to choose between Sentiment, which bade him refuse and stay with the battery to whose well-being he had devoted seven of the best years of his life, and Ambition, which urged him, as a man of energy and brains, to accept his just reward with a view to further advancement. Ambition, backed by his major’s promise to have him
- 67. as a subalternlater on, had vanquished. Suppressing the inevitable feeling of nostalgia which rose in him, he had joined the divisional ammunition column, prepared to do his best in a position wholly distasteful to him. In an army every unit depends for its efficiency upon the system of discipline inculcated by its commander, aided by the spirit of individual enthusiasm which pervades its members; the less the enthusiasm the sterner must the discipline be. Now a D.A.C., as it is familiarly called, is not, in the inner meaning of the phrase, a cohesive unit. In peace it exists only on paper; it is formed during mobilisation by the haphazard collection of a certain number of officers, mostly ‘dug-outs’; close upon 500 men, nearly all reservists; and about 700 horses, many of which are rejections from other and, in a sense, more important units. Its business, as its name indicates, is to supply a division with ammunition, and its duties in this connection are relatively simple. Its wagons transport shells, cartridges, and bullets to the brigade ammunition columns, whence they return empty and begin again. It is obvious that the men engaged upon this work need not, in ordinary circumstances, be heroes; it is also obvious that their rôle, though fundamentally an important one, does not tend to foster an intense esprit de corps. A man can be thrilled at the idea of a charge or of saving guns under a hurricane of fire, but not with the monotonous job of loading wagons and then driving them a set number of miles daily along the same straight road. A stevedore or a carter has as much incentive to enthusiasm for his work. The commander of a D.A.C., therefore, to ensure efficiency in his unit, must be a zealous disciplinarian with a strong personality. But Pickersdyke’s new colonel was neither. The war had dragged him from a life of slothful ease to one of bustle and discomfort. Being elderly, stout, and constitutionally idle, he had quickly allowed his early zeal to cool off, and now, after six months of the campaign, the state of his command was lamentable. To Pickersdyke, coming from a battery with proud traditions and a high reputation, whose members regarded its good name in the way that a son does that of
- 68. his mother, itseemed little short of criminal that such laxity should be permitted. On taking over a section he ‘got down to it,’ as he said, at once, and became forthwith a most unpopular officer. But that, though he knew it well, did not deter him. He made the lives of various sergeants and junior N.C.O.s unbearable until they began to see that it was wiser ‘to smarten themselves up a bit’ after his suggestion. In a month the difference between his section and the others was obvious. The horses were properly groomed and had begun to improve in their condition—before, they had been poor to a degree; the sergeant-major no longer grew a weekly beard nor smoked a pipe during stable hour; the number of the defaulters, which under the new régime was at first large, had dwindled to a negligible quantity. In two months that section was for all practical purposes a model one, and Pickersdyke was able to regard the results of his unstinted efforts with satisfaction. The colonel, who was not blind where his own interests were concerned, sent for Pickersdyke one day and said: ‘You’ve done very well with your section; it’s quite the best in the column now.’ Pickersdyke was pleased; he was as modest as most men, but he appreciated recognition of his merits. Moreover, for his own ends, he was anxious to impress his commanding officer. He was less pleased when the latter continued: ‘I’m going to post you to No. 3 Section now, and I hope you’ll do the same with that.’ No. 3 Section was notorious. Pickersdyke, if he had been a man of Biblical knowledge (which he was not), would have compared himself to Jacob, who waited seven years for Rachel and then was tricked into taking Leah. The vision of his four days’ leave—long overdue—faded away. He foresaw a further and still more difficult period of uncongenial work in front of him. But, having no choice, he was obliged to acquiesce.
- 69. Once again hebegan at the beginning, instilling into unruly minds the elementary notions that orders are given to be obeyed, that the first duty of a mounted man is to his horses, and that personal cleanliness and smartness in appearance are military virtues not beneath notice. This time the drudgery was even worse, and he was considerably hampered by the touchiness and jealousy of the real section commander, who was a dug-out captain of conspicuous inability. There was much unpleasantness, there was at one time very nearly a mutiny, and there were not a few courts-martial. It was three months and a half before that section found, so to speak, its military soul. And then the colonel, satisfied that the two remaining sections were well enough commanded to shift for themselves if properly guided, seized his chance and made Pickersdyke his adjutant. Here was a man, he felt, endowed with an astonishing energy and considerable powers of organisation, the very person, in fact, to save his commanding officer trouble and to relieve him of all real responsibility. This occurred about the middle of July. From then until well on into September, Pickersdyke remained a fixture in a small French village on the lines of communication, miles from the front, out of all touch with his old comrades, with no distractions and no outlet for his energies except work of a purely routine character. ‘It might be peace-time and me a bloomin’ clerk’ was how he expressed his disgust. But he still hoped, for he believed that to the efficient the rewards of efficiency come in due course and are never long delayed. Without being conceited, he was perhaps more aware of his own possibilities than of his limitations. In the old days in his battery he had been the major’s right-hand man and the familiar (but always respectful) friend of the subalterns. In the early days of the war he had succeeded amazingly where others in his position had certainly failed. His management of affairs ‘behind the scenes’ had been unsurpassed. Never once, from the moment when his unit left Havre till a month later it arrived upon the Aisne, had its men
- 70. been short offood or its horses of forage. He had replaced deficiencies from some apparently inexhaustible store of ‘spares’; he had provided the best billets, the safest wagon lines, the freshest bread with a consistency that was almost uncanny. In the darkest days of the retreat he had remained unperturbed, ‘pinching’ freely when blandishments failed, distributing the comforts as well as the necessities of life with a lavish hand and an optimistic smile. His wits and his resource had been tested to the utmost. He had enjoyed the contest (it was his nature to do that), and he had come through triumphant and still smiling. During the stationary period on the Aisne, and later in Flanders, he had managed the wagon line—that other half of a battery which consists of almost everything except the guns and their complement of officers and men—practically unaided. On more than one occasion he had brought up ammunition along a very dangerous route at critical moments. He received his commission late in December, at a time when his battery was out of action, ‘resting.’ He dined in the officers’ mess, receiving their congratulations with becoming modesty and their drink without unnecessary reserve. It was on this occasion that he had induced his major to promise to get him back. Then he departed, sorrowful in spite of all his pride in being an officer, to join the column. There, in the seclusion of his billet, he studied army lists and watched the name of the senior subaltern of the battery creep towards the head of the roll. When that officer was promoted captain there would be a vacancy, and that vacancy would be Pickersdyke’s chance. Meanwhile, to fit himself for what he hoped to become, he spent whole evenings poring over manuals of telephony and gun-drill; he learnt by heart abstruse passages of Field Artillery Training; he ordered the latest treatises on gunnery, both practical and theoretical, to be sent out to him from England; and he even battled valiantly with logarithms and a slide-rule.... From all the foregoing it will be understood how bitter was his disappointment when his application to be transferred was refused.
- 71. His colonel’s attitudeastonished him. He had expected recognition of that industry and usefulness of which he had given unchallengeable proof. But the colonel, instead of saying: ‘You have done well; I will not stand in your way, much as I should like to keep you,’ merely observed, ‘I’m sorry, but you cannot be spared.’ And he made it unmistakably plain that what he meant was: ‘Do you think I’m such a fool as to let you go? I’ll see you damned first!’ Thus it was that Pickersdyke, a disillusioned and a baffled man, stared out of the window with wrath and bitterness in his heart. For he wanted to go back to ‘the old troop’; he was obsessed with the idea almost to the exclusion of everything else. He craved for the old faces and the old familiar atmosphere as a drug-maniac craves for morphia. It was his right, he had earned it by nine months of drudgery—and who the devil, anyway, he felt, was this old fool to thwart him? Extravagant plans for vengeance flitted through his mind. Supposing he were to lose half a dozen wagons or thousands of rounds of howitzer ammunition, would his colonel get sent home? Not he—he’d blame his adjutant, and the latter would quite possibly be court-martialled. Should he hide all the colonel’s clothes and only reveal their whereabouts when the application had been forwarded? Should he steal his whisky (without which it was doubtful if he could exist), put poison in his tea, or write an anonymous letter to headquarters accusing him of espionage? He sighed—ingenuity, his valuable ally on many a doubtful occasion, failed him now. Then it occurred to him to appeal to one Lorrison, who was the captain of his old battery, and whom he had known for years as one of his subalterns. ‘Dear Lorrison,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve just had an interview with my old man and he won’t agree to my transfer. I’m afraid it’s a
- 72. wash-out unless somethingcan be done quickly, as I suppose Jordan will be promoted very soon.’ (Jordan was the senior subaltern.) ‘You know how much I want to get back in time for the big show. Can you do anything? Sorry to trouble you, and now I must close. ‘Yours, ‘W. Pickersdyke.’ Then he summoned his servant. Gunner Scupham was an elderly individual with grey hair, a dignified deportment, and a countenance which suggested extreme honesty of soul but no intelligence whatsoever. Which fact was of great assistance to him in the perpetration of his more complicated villainies. He had not been Pickersdyke’s storeman for many years for nothing. His devotion was a by-word, but his familiarity was sometimes a little startling. ‘’E won’t let us go,’ announced Pickersdyke. ‘Strafe the blighter!’ replied Scupham feelingly. ‘I’m proper fed up with this ’ere column job.’ ‘Get the office bike, take this note to Captain Lorrison, and bring back an answer. Here’s a pass.’ Scupham departed, grumbling audibly. It meant a fifteen-mile ride, the day was warm, and he disliked physical exertion. He returned late that evening with the answer, which was as follows: ‘Dear Pickers,—Curse your fool colonel. Jordan may go any day, and if we don’t get you we’ll probably be stuck with some child who knows nothing. Besides, we want you to come. The preliminary bombardment is well under way, so there’s not much time. Meet me at the B.A.C.[7] headquarters to-morrow evening at 8 and we’ll fix up something. In haste, ‘Yours ever,
- 73. ‘T. Lorrison.’ There arepeople who do not believe in luck. But if it was not luck which assisted Pickersdyke by producing the events which followed his receipt of that note, then it was Providence in a genial and most considerate mood. He spent a long time trying to think of a reasonable excuse for going to see Lorrison, but he might have saved himself the trouble. Some light-hearted fool had sent up shrapnel instead of high explosive to the very B.A.C. that Pickersdyke wanted to visit. Angry telephone messages were coming through, and the colonel at once sent his adjutant up to offer plausible explanations. Pickersdyke covered a lot of ground that afternoon. It was necessary to find an infuriated artillery brigadier and persuade him that the error was not likely to occur again, and was in any case not really the fault of the D.A.C. section commander. It was then necessary to find this latter and make it clear to him that he was without doubt the most incompetent officer in the allied forces, and that the error was entirely due to his carelessness. And it was essential to arrange for forwarding what was required. Lorrison arrived punctually and evidently rather excited. ‘What price the news?’ he said at once. Pickersdyke had heard none. He had been far too busy. ‘We’re for it at last—going to bombard all night till 4.30 a.m.—every bally gun in the army as far as I can see. And we’ve got orders to be ready to move in close support of the infantry if they get through. To move! Just think of that after all these months.’ Pickersdyke swore as he had not done since he was a rough-riding bombardier. ‘And that’s boxed my chances,’ he ended up. ‘Wait a bit,’ said Lorrison. ‘There’s a vacancy waiting for you if you’ll take it. We got pretty badly “crumped”[8] last night. The
- 74. Bosches put somebig “hows” and a couple of “pip-squeak” batteries on to us just when we were replenishing. They smashed up several wagons and did a lot of damage. Poor old Jordan got the devil of a shaking—he was thrown about ten yards. Lucky not to be blown to bits, though. Anyway, he’s been sent to hospital.’ He looked inquiringly at Pickersdyke. The latter’s face portrayed an unholy joy. ‘Will I take his place?’ he cried. ‘Lummy! I should think I would. Don’t care what the colonel says afterwards. When can I join? Now?’ ‘As soon as I’ve seen about getting some more wagons from the B.A.C. we’ll go up together,’ answered Lorrison. Pickersdyke, who had no conscience whatever on occasions such as this, sent a message to his colonel to say that he was staying up for the night (he omitted to say precisely where!), as there would be much to arrange in the morning. To Scupham he wrote: ‘Collect all the kit you can and come up to the battery at once. Say nothing.’ He was perfectly aware that he was doing a wildly illegal thing. He felt like an escaped convict breathing the air of freedom and making for his home and family. Forty colonels would not have stopped him at that moment. II. The major commanding the ⸺th Battery sat in his dug-out examining a large-scale trench map. His watch, carefully synchronised with those of the staff, lay on the table in front of him. Outside, his six guns were firing steadily, each concussion (and there were twelve a minute) shaking everything that was not a fixture in the little room. Hundreds of guns along miles of front and miles of depth were taking part in the most stupendous bombardment yet
- 75. attempted by thearmy. From ‘Granny,’ the enormous howitzer that fired six times an hour at a range of seventeen thousand yards, to machine guns in the front line trenches, every available piece of ordnance was adding its quota to what constituted a veritable hell of noise. The major had been ordered to cut the wire entanglements between two given points and to stop firing at 4.30 a.m. precisely. He had no certain means of knowing whether he had completed his task or not. He only knew that his ‘lines of fire,’ his range, and his ‘height of burst’ as previously registered in daylight were correct, that his layers could be depended upon, and that he had put about a thousand rounds of shrapnel into a hundred and fifty yards of front. At 4.29 he rose and stood, watch in hand, in the doorway of his dug- out. A man with a megaphone waited at his elbow. The major, war- worn though he was, was still young enough in spirit to be thrilled by the mechanical regularity of his battery’s fire. This perfection of drill was his work, the result of months and months of practice, of loving care, and of minute attention to detail. Dawn was beginning to creep into the sky, and he could just distinguish the silhouettes of the two right-hand guns. The flash as one of them fired revealed momentarily the figures of the gunners grouped round the breech like demons round some spectral engine of destruction. Precisely five seconds afterwards a second flash denoted that the next gun had fired—and so on in sequence from right to left until it was the turn of Number One again. ‘Stop,’ said the major when the minute hand of his watch was exactly over the half-hour. ‘Stop!’ roared the man with the megaphone. It was as if the order had been heard all along the entire front. The bombardment ceased almost abruptly, and rifle and machine- gun fire became audible again. On a colossal scale the effect was that of the throttling down of a powerful motor-car whose engine had been allowed to race. Then, not many moments afterwards,
- 76. from far awayto the eastward there came faint, confused sounds of shouts and cheering. It was the infantry, the long-suffering, tenacious, wonderful infantry charging valiantly into the cold grey dawn along the avenues prepared by the guns.... For Pickersdyke it had been a night of pure joy, unspoilt by any qualms of conscience. He had been welcomed at the battery as a kind of returned wanderer and given a section of guns at once. The major—who feared no man’s wrath, least of all that of a dug-out D.A.C. commander—had promised to back him up if awkward questions were asked. Pickersdyke had only one cause for disappointment—the whole thing had gone too smoothly. He was bursting with technical knowledge, he could have repaired almost any breakdown, and had kept a keen look-out for all ordinary mistakes. But nothing went wrong and no mistakes were made. In this battery the liability of human error had been reduced to a negligible minimum. Pickersdyke had had nothing further to do than to pass orders and see that they were duly received. Nevertheless he had loved every moment of it, for he had come into his own—he was back in the old troop, taking part in a ‘big show.’ As he observed to the major whilst they were drinking hot coffee in the dug-out afterwards: ‘Even if I do get court-martialled for desertion, sir, that last little lot was worth it!’ And he grinned as does a man well pleased with the success of his schemes. To complete his satisfaction, Scupham appeared soon afterwards bringing up a large bundle of kit and a few luxuries in the way of food. It transpired that he had presented himself to the last- joined subaltern of the D.A.C. and had bluffed that perplexed and inexperienced officer into turning out a cart to drive him as far as the battery wagon line, whence he had come up on an ammunition wagon. It was almost daylight when the battery opened fire again, taking its orders by telephone now from the F.O.O.,[9] who was in close touch with the infantry and could see what was happening. The rate
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