This day marked the end of the Turkish IVth[Pg 273] Army, but, as it split up into a number of detached groups, which were attacked throughout the day by brigades, regiments, and even single squadrons of the 4th and 5th Cavalry Divisions, it is impossible to give any very concise account of its destruction. It is clear, however, that, on the morning of the 30th, the army was marching in two main bodies. The leading portion, that which had been seen and reported by our aircraft, consisted of the remains of the Turkish 3rd Cavalry Division, with such of the infantry as had been able to keep up with the mounted troops. The following portion, evidently much more disorganised, was marching some eight to ten miles in rear.

The 13th Brigade, moving along the south bank of the Wadi el Zabirani, encountered some opposition on the ridge of the Jebel el Aswad, north of Deir Khabiye, from enemy troops occupying a portion of the entrenched position that has been mentioned above. By mid-day, however, the brigade had succeeded in dispersing the enemy, taking some 700 prisoners. Meanwhile the 14th Brigade had got astride the Deraa-Damascus road, north of Kiswe. It was just in time to intercept the leading portion of the Turkish force, the advanced elements of which had cleared Kiswe, and were hurrying up the road over the Jebel el Aswad towards Damascus.

which followed the encounter, the greater part of what was left of the Turkish 3rd Cavalry Division, including the divisional commander and his staff, fell into our hands. The remainder of the force was driven back, completely broken, to Kiswe.

At this time the 15th Brigade was in divisional reserve a little east of Khan el Shiha it is inevitable that the country must suffer..

Shortly afterwards, about four in the afternoon,[Pg 274] the second portion of the Turkish army was seen approaching Kiswe, followed by the 11th Brigade of the 4th Cavalry Division. This brigade had been checked for a time at Khiyara Chiftlik, about six miles south of Kiswe, by a body of the enemy who took up a position behind the mud walls of a farm there. The brigade was rather heavily shelled from the direction of Kalaat el Nuhas at the same time. The farm was cleared by a mounted charge, and the Turks dispersed. Some escaped up the steep slopes of the Jebel el Mania to the east, but the bulk of them continued along the main road to Kiswe. On their arrival there, they joined the demoralised remnants of the leading portion of their force, that had escaped the onslaught of the 14th Brigade. Here they learnt that the road to Damascus was barred, and, looking backwards, saw the lances of the 4th Cavalry Division approaching. Caught between the two forces, they made a last despairing attempt to break through. There appears to have been a general sauve qui peut. Some attempted the Damascus road, and were ridden down and captured by the 14th Brigade. Others made their way north-east up the Nahr el Awaj, and attempted a counter-attack against the left flank of this brigade, but were broken up by the fire of the Essex Battery. They split up into small groups, and disappeared among the gardens of the Damascus plain east of the city, where the majority of them were almost certainly murdered by the natives. The largest body broke out to the north-west, and fell into the arms of the 13th Brigade near Sahnaya, where about 1500 prisoners were taken, and many were killed. Others again were observed trying to escape to the east. The Ayrshire Battery, attached to the 11th Brigade, galloped forward, supported by two machine[Pg 275] guns and a few Hotchkiss rifles, and came into action at close range, causing the Turks to scatter wildly. The 29th Lancers pursued these disorganised parties up the slopes of the Jebel el Mania, and had rounded up large numbers of them before darkness put an end to the pursuit. Finally, a number remained in Kiswe, and tried to organise some sort of resistance there. At five o'clock, however, the 13th Brigade swept suddenly down upon the village and captured it, with about 700 prisoners and several guns.
 

to assign a special place to the history now known as biased, because, on the one hand, it seems that it is not a simple history of sentiment and poetry, since it has an end to attain, and on the other because such end is not imposed upon it from without, but coincides with the conception of history itself. Hence it would seem fitting to look upon it as a form of history standing half-way between poetry and practicism,[Pg 44] a mixture of the two. But mixed forms and hybrid products exist only in the fictitious classifications of empiricists, never in the reality of the spirit, and biased history, when closely examined, is really either poetical history or practicistical history. An exception must always be made of the books in which the two moments are sometimes to be found side by side, as indeed one usually finds true history and chronicle and the document and philological and poetical history side by side. What gives the illusion of a mingling or of a special form of history is the fact that many take their point of departure from poetical inspiration (love of country, faith in their country, enthusiasm for a great man, and so on) and end with practical calculations: they begin with poetry and end with the allegations of the special pleader, and sometimes, although more rarely, they follow an opposite course. This duplication is to be observed in the numerous histories of parties that have been composed since the world was a world, and it is not difficult to discover in what parts of them we have manifestations of poetry and in what parts of calculation. Good taste and criticism are continually effecting this separation for history, as for art and poetry in general.

It is true that good taste loves and accepts poetry and discriminates between the practical intentions of the poet and those of the historian-poet; but those intentions are received and admitted by the moral conscience, provided always that they are good intentions and consequently good actions; and although people are disposed to speak ill of advocates in general, it is certain that the honest advocate and the prudent orator cannot be dispensed with in social life. Nor has so-called practicistical history ever been dispensed with, either[Pg 45] according to the Gr?co-Roman practice, which was that of proposing portraits of statesmen, of captains, and of heroic women as models for the soul, or according to that of the Middle Ages, which was to repeat the lives of saints and hermits of the desert, or of knights strong of arm and of unshakable faith, or in our own modern world, which recommends as edifying and stimulating reading the lives and 'legends' of inventors, of business men, of explorers, and of millionaires. Educative histories, composed with the view of promoting definite practical or moral dispositions, really exist, and every Italian knows how great were the effects of Colletta's and Balbo's histories and the like during the period of the Risorgimento, and everyone knows books that have 'inspired' him or inculcated in him the love of his own country, of his town and steeple　The short stories were first collected in a little volume in 1879..

This moral efficacy, which belongs to morality and not to history, has had so strong a hold upon the mind that the prejudice still survives of assigning a moral function to history (as also to poetry) in the field of teaching. This prejudice is still to be found inspiring even Labriola's pedagogic essay on The Teaching of History. But if we mean by the word 'history' both history that is thought as well as that which, on the contrary, is poetry, philology, or moral will, it is clear that 'history' will enter the educational process not under one form alone, but under all these forms. But as history proper it will only enter it under one of them, which is not that of moral education, exclusively or abstractly considered, but of the education or development of thought.

 

Having overthrown this old theory of the Gulf Stream, Captain Livingston attempted to set up one which is equally unfounded. He ascribed the current to the sun’s apparent yearly motion and the influence thus exerted on the waters of the Atlantic. A sort of yearly tide is conceived, according to this theory, to be the true parent of the Gulf current. It need hardly be said, however, that a phenomenon which remains without change through the winter and summer seasons cannot possibly be referred to the operation of such a cause as a yearly tide.

It is to Dr. Franklin that we owe the first theory of the Gulf Stream which has met with general acceptance. He held that the Gulf Stream is formed by the outflow of waters which have been forced into the Caribbean Sea by the trade-winds; so that the pressure of these winds on the Atlantic Ocean forms, according to Dr. Franklin, the true motive power of the Gulf Stream machinery. According to Maury, this theory has ‘come to be the most generally received opinion in the mind of seafaring people.’ It supplies a moving force of undoubted efficiency. We know that as the trade-winds travel towards the equator they lose their westerly motion. It is reasonable to suppose that this is caused by friction against the surface of the ocean, to which, therefore, a corresponding westerly motion must have been imparted.
about Franklin’s theory which126 commends it favourably to consideration. But when we examine it somewhat more closely, several very decided flaws present themselves to our attention.

Consider, in the first place, the enormous mass of water moved by the supposed agency of the winds. Air has a weight—volume for volume—which is less than one eight-hundredth part of that of water. So that, to create a water-current, an air-current more than eight hundred times as large and of equal velocity must expend the whole of its motion. Now the trade-winds are gentle winds, their velocity scarcely exceeding in general that of the more swiftly-moving portions of the Gulf Stream. But even assigning to them a velocity four times as great, we still want an air-current two hundred times as large as the water-current. And the former must give up the whole of its motion, which, in the case of so elastic a substance as air, would hardly happen, the upper air being unlikely to be much affected by the motion of the lower　Two considerations must have caused Scheer the gravest possible anxiety..

But this is far from being all. If the trade-winds blew throughout the year, we might be disposed to recognise their influence upon the Gulf Stream as a paramount, if not the sole one. But this is not the case. Captain Maury states that, ‘With the view of ascertaining the average number of days during the year that the north-east trade-winds of the Atlantic operate upon the currents between twenty-five degrees north latitude and the equator, log-books containing no less than 380,284 observations on the force and direction of the wind in that ocean were examined. The data127 thus afforded were carefully compared and discussed. The results show that within these latitudes—and on the average—the wind from the north-east is in excess of the winds from the south-west only 111 days out of the 365. Now, can the north-east trades,‘ he pertinently asks, ‘by blowing for less than one-third of the time, cause the Gulf Stream to run all the time, and without varying its velocity either to their force or to their prevalence?’
 

They would wait for the passing of the next train, bivouacing in the open air, or if they found they were being watched would start to walk over the deserted fields to the next station, in the hope that there they would be more fortunate. And so they arrived at Madrid after an adventurous journey of many days, with long waits and not a few cuffs. In the Calle de Sevilla and the Puerta del Sol, they admired the groups of unemployed toreros, superior beings, from whom they ventured to beg—without any result—a little alms to continue their journey. A servant of the Plaza de Toros who came from Seville had pity on them, and let them sleep in the stables, procuring them further the delight of seeing a corrida of young bulls in the famous circus, which, however, did not seem to them as imposing as the one in their own country.

Frightened at their own daring, and seeing the end of their excursion ever further and further off, they decided to return to Seville in the same way that they had come, but from that time they took a pleasure in these stolen journeys on the railway. They travelled to many places of small importance in the different Andalusian provinces, whenever they heard vague rumours of "fiestas" with their corresponding "capeas." In this way they travelled as far as La Mancha, and Estremadura, and if bad luck obliged them to go on foot, they took refuge in the hovels of the peasants, credulous, good-natured people, who were astounded at their youth, their daring and their bombastic talk, and took them for real toreros.

made them exercise the [Pg 72]cunning of primitive man to satisfy their wants. In the neighbourhood of country houses, they would crawl on their stomachs to steal the vegetables without being seen. They would watch whole hours for a solitary hen to come near them, and having wrung her neck would proceed on their tramp, to light a fire of dry wood in the middle of the day, and swallow the poor bird scorched and half raw with the voracity of little savages. The field mastiffs they feared more than bulls; these watchdogs were difficult brutes to fight, when they rushed upon the boys showing their fangs, as if the strange aspect of the latter infuriated them and they scented enemies to personal property The Prince was very much alarmed when he perceived that Selbst was growing so rapidly..

Sometimes when they were sleeping in the open air near a station waiting for a train to pass, a couple of Civil Guards would rouse them. However, the guardians of law and order were pacified when they saw the red cloth bundles which served these vagabonds as pillows. Very civilly they would take off the urchins' caps, and finding the hairy appendage of the pig-tail, they would move off laughing, and make no further enquiries. They were not little thieves; they were "aficionados" going to the "capeas." In this tolerance there was a mixture of sympathy for the national pastime, and respect towards the obscurity of the future. Who could tell if perhaps one of these ragged lads, with poverty stricken exterior, might not become in the future a "star of the art," a great man who would pledge[57] bulls to kings, would live like a prince, and whose exploits and sayings would be recorded in the newspapers!

Spaniard's books there is waged, on both a large scale and a small, the ceaseless, implacable struggle of the new against the old. This eternal battle early formed an appreciable part of even the writer's short fiction. His old seamen look with scorn upon the steam-vessels that replace their beloved barks; his vintners regret the passing of the good old days when sherry sold high and had not yet been ousted from the market by cheap, new-fangled concoctions; his toilers begin to rebel against ecclesiastical authority; some of his heroes are even capable of falling in love with Jewesses or with women below their station (Luna Benamor, Los Muertos Mandan); everywhere is the fermentation of transition. His protagonists,—red-blooded, vigorous, determined,—usually fail at the end, but if there are victories that spell failure, so are there failures that spell victory. It is the clash of these ancient and modern forces that strikes the spark which ignites the author's passion. He is with the new and of it, yet rises above blind partisanship. His dominant figures, chiefly men, are representative of the Spain of to-morrow; not that ma?ana which has so long (and often unjustly) been a standing reproach to Iberian procrastination, but a to-morrow of rebirth, of rededication to lofty ideals and glowing realities.

In Sangre y Arena (Blood and Sand, written in 1908) Blasco Ibá?ez attacks the Spanish national sport. With characteristic thoroughness, approaching his subject from the psychological, the historical, the national, the humane, the dramatic and narrative standpoint, he evolves another of his notable documents, worthy of a place among the great tracts of literary history The Prince wasvery much alarmedwhen he perceived that Selbstwas growing sorapidly..

His process, like his plot, is simple; whether attacking the Church or the evils of drink, or the bloodlust of the[Pg viii] bull ring, his methods are usually the same. He provides a protagonist who shall serve as the vehicle or symbol of his ideas, surrounding him with minor personages intended to serve as a foil or as a prop. He fills in the background with all the wealth of descriptive and coloring powers at his command—and these powers are as highly developed in Ibá?ez, I believe, as in any living writer. The beauty of Blasco Ibá?ez's descriptions—a beauty by no means confined to the pictures he summons to the mind—is that, at their best, they rise to interpretation. He not only brings before the eye a vivid image, but communicates to the spirit an intellectual reaction. Here he is the master who penetrates beyond the exterior into the inner significance; the reader is carried into the swirl of the action itself, for the magic of the author's pen imparts a sense of palpitant actuality; you are yourself a soldier at the Marne, you fairly drown with Ulises in his beloved Mediterranean, you defend the besieged city of Saguntum, you pant with the swordsman in the bloody arena. This gift of imparting actuality to his scenes is but another evidence of the Spaniard's dynamic personality; he lives his actions so thoroughly that we live them with him; his gift of second sight gives us to see beyond amphitheatres of blood and sand into national character, beyond a village struggle into the vexed problem of land, labor and property. Against this type of background develops the characteristic Ibá?ez plot, by no means lacking intimate interest, yet beginning somewhat slowly and gathering the irresistible momentum of a powerful body.