WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
VITRY-LE-FRANÇOISHISTORIC VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, ON THE MARNEPREFATORY NOTE
VITRY-LE-FRANÇOISHISTORIC VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, ON THE MARNE
HISTORIC VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, ON THE MARNE
Literaryprojects may be put in two classes. Some are like steamers that go in a regulated course direct to their destinations, while others tack here and there like sailing ships, governed by a zigzag progress.
The subject of bridges belongs to this latter class. For five-and-twenty years I have tried to order it into a methodised hobby. As well try to teach a hive of honey-bees never to visit certain flowers in a garden, andnever to fly beyond certain pathways and hedges. Yet a writer cannot help rebelling when his chosen theme declines to play in the game of authorship, and deviates from many careful plans which are made for its benefit. Every chapter in this book has been rewritten eight or ten times, yet my sailing ship has not become an Atlantic liner.
My wish for a long time was to show the evolution of bridges in about seven hundred photographic illustrations, with eight lines of text under each print; and in preparation for this work I collected materials, and received invaluable help from other pontists, particularly from Mr. Frank Brangwyn, Mr. H. T. Crofton, Mr. C. S. Sargisson, Mr. Edgar Wigram, theRev.O. M. Jackson, and the Church Missionary Society. Pontist after pontist sent me notes, photographs, sketches; and then Frank Brangwyn suggested that we should work in collaboration. Here was luck indeed! His pictures and drawings would be the book of art; and the rambling subject, if it passed over mere technique into the human drama, ought to interest the general reader who does generally read. For bridges have represented types of society, every change in their development having been brought about by changes in social needs.
One thing more than any other is attractive to a pontist: it is the varied strife that bridges and roads have circulated, not only in military campaigns, but in the thronged struggle for existence—the one incessant war in the affairsof men. A routine of idle sentiment prattles about an illusion named Peace, yet strife everywhere remains the historian of life, every effort to do and to live claiming a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed. Even sleep, the nearest kinswoman of peace, is united to the law of battle by dreams that torture. A pontist, then, when studying the strife that roads and bridges have distributed, must clear from his mind the fanciful ideas that pacifism has invented; he is an adventurer in history, not an idler in a world of visions. To-day, above all, he is called upon to see the truth, because Europe, driven by the rival motive-powers of hostile ideals, has passed from industrial strikes and contests into other phases of necessary warfare. Once more differing civilizations will have their worth tested to the full on stricken fields; and once more roads and bridges will dominate the military tactics and strategy.
This great War broke out when my last chapter was nearly finished, and its early events illustrate and confirm the main arguments which I have tried to make as clear as possible, so that no person may think of bridges apart from their historic service to mankind. During many centuries, for example, all strategical bridges were fortified; then a gradual decline began, and it culminated in the defenceless modern bridge that sappers blow up in a few minutes. Bridge-builders everywhere have much good sense to regain from the science of national defence, a very difficult science to-day, for many of its methods are being renderedobsolete by airships and aeroplanes. So a book on historic bridges could not be published at a time more opportune than the present moment.
Several collectors have lent pictures, and their kind aid is acknowledged in the table of illustrations.
W. S. S.
November 11th, 1914.