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This Book List Sectory 15
Page 05
In the old warfare a man was either stabbed, shot, or thrust through after an hour or so of excitement, and all the wounded on the field were either comfortably murdered or attended to before the dawn of the next day. One was killed by human hands, with understandable and tolerable injuries. But in this war the bulk of the dead--of the western Allies, at any rate--have been killed by machinery, the wounds have been often of an inconceivable horribleness, and the fate of the wounded has been more frightful than was ever the plight of wounded in the hands of victorious savages. For days multitudes of men have been left mangled, half buried in mud and filth, or soaked with water, or frozen, crying, raving between the contending trenches. The number of men that the war, without actual physical wounds, has shattered mentally and driven insane because of its noise, its stresses, its strange unnaturalness, is enormous. Horror in this war has overcome more men than did all the arrows of Cressy.
Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave of Altamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here you might see at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which deserts mere black and white for colour-shading of the most free description. Indeed, it is almost too free, in my judgment; for, though the control of the artist over his rude material is complete, he is inclined to turn his back on real life, forcing the animal forms into attitudes more striking than natural, and endowing their faces sometimes, as it seems to me, with almost human expressions. Whatever may be thought of the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men, certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almost invariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings, half animal and half human; or else--as perhaps is more probable--masked dancers. At one place, however--namely, in the rock shelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, we have a picture of a group of women dancers who are not masked, but attired in the style of the hour. They wear high hats or chignons, tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts. Really, considering that we thus have a contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst there are likewise the numerous stencilled hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I have seen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy floor, hardened over with stalagmite, the actual print of a foot, we are brought very near to our palaeolithic forerunners; though indefinite ages part them from us if we reckon by sheer time.
The Secundury was a stream with an average width of 60 m. and in many places quite deep. It had a great many little springs and streamlets flowing into it between steep cuts in its high embankments, which were of alluvial formation mingled with decayed vegetation. The banks almost all along were from 40 to 50 ft. high. We came across a large tributary on the right side of the river. It was evidently the stream to which we had first come on our disastrous march across the forest, and which I had mistaken for the Secundury. Beyond this river we came across some small rapids, of no importance and quite easy to negotiate by the large boats, although in one or two cases tow-ropes had to be used by the men who had landed in order to pull the boats through.
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