With our nineteenth-century inventions, we could, it is true, mow down
these castle heights in half an hour, and we might well be proud of the
achievement as a nation; but our warfare is at best but poor mercenary
work, the heart of the nation--the life and courage of its people--are
not in it.[40] We civilians, are too much protected, and most of us do
not know how to fight. Like the Athenians, we are supposed to be
cultivating the arts of peace, but, as we endeavoured to show at Caen,
if judged by our monuments, we are making no great mark in our
generation. Perhaps this is a question rather wide of our subject, but
let us at least contend for one thing, viz.:--that if the mission of the
present generation is not to wield battle-axes, but rather to fight
social battles, say for the amelioration of the unhappy part of the
population; and if it is our fortune to be protected the while, by a
staff of policemen, and by strong laws against crime--that we should not
neglect, at the same time, to cultivate and preserve the personal valour
that is in us, by the use of arms. It may be that the day is shortly
coming (our engineers predict that we shall soon have hand-to-hand
fighting again), when every individual amongst us will have to put his
courage to the proof; and if this should ever happen, it will certainly
not diminish our interest in the construction and arrangement of these
mediæval castles, or in the battles that have been fought beneath their
walls.




CHAPTER IX.

_ROUEN._