The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do they
tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the more
populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture of
security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the
geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men
that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the
Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the
hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which
here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as
well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,
which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the
influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,
and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.
So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too
much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of
the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know
nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim
certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by
this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon
our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a
fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The
greatest of Armadas may set out and not return.
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