Читать книгу The Road - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 13

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But most important of all the effects of the bridge is its creation of a nodal point, that is, a knot or crossing of ways. The bridge effects this in two fashions: firstly by that tendency to a convergence of roads upon the bridge which I have just noted, and secondly, and much more important, by the transverse of the bridge and the river. A river is also a high road if it is in any way navigable. Therefore, wherever a land road crosses a river and establishes a bridge you get a crossways of communications. At such a point, where many avenues of approach meet, and whence opportunities of travel to different places radiate, you have what is called in political geography a Nodal Point.

Icknield Street in the Oxfordshire Chilterns

Now, the nodal point is of such importance that it merits particular attention. The nodal point, especially if it is established by a bridge, has two great functions in history. It determines the strategy of campaigns (and alters even the tactics of actions), it determines the growth of towns. It has been said that London was made by its bridge. Whether there was a settlement (there probably was) upon the gravelly hill which approached the river from the north, before any bridge was thrown across the tidal Thames, we do not know; but it is certain that the throwing of this bridge gave London its opportunity for development, and what is true of London is true of Paris, of Rouen, of Maestricht, of Cologne, and of twenty other great urban centres in our civilization. Strategically, a commander holding a nodal point retains the opportunity of moving along any one of many lines of movement, and at the same time denies the opportunity of junction to his enemies. To put it in its simplest form, a commander holding a nodal point and concentrated there can prevent the concentration of two fractions of his enemy along any two roads radiating from that nodal point. He can himself march up each of these consecutively and defeat the two fractions of his enemy in detail. That is the simplest possible case, and it can be developed into any amount of detail and intricacy.

The bridge is the point where the commerce up and down stream crosses the road-commerce transversely to the river-commerce, and the nodal point of the bridge establishes a market. But that nodal point has other characters even more important to civilian life. It creates a point of trans-shipment, where goods must be transferred from the water vehicle to the land vehicle. In their transference you have the political opportunity of examination and toll, and, if necessary, interception; and you also have, of course, the whole of the middleman business of dealing with and passing through the goods—you have the depot and the warehousing and all the adjuncts of a built-up commercial centre and a market.

But the bridge as a nodal point has yet another occasional function which has marked all history. That function it exercises when it is the lowest bridge upon a great navigable river. Such a bridge—the bridge of Rome for instance, the bridge of London, the bridge of Gloucester, the bridge of Newcastle, etc.—has been the making of inland ports. It must be remembered that before the advent of the railway, or at any rate before the organization of rapid and easy road travel, it was to the interest of sea-borne trade to penetrate into the heart of the country as far as possible. You avoided the cost of trans-shipment, and you had a much cheaper means of conveyance than anything that went by land. But the first permanent bridge across a waterway blocked the further progress up-stream of sea-borne traffic. Therefore there was a tendency to keep this first bridge well up-stream. Further, whenever it was made, it tended to create a glut of traffic at this point of section. The cargoes from the sea came here and could go no further, and this last function of the bridge is perhaps of all its historical functions the most important. Even where a river is very rapid, as the Tiber, the first bridge has some effect. Where it is tidal it is, of course, as in the cases we have just quoted, of the greatest effect, and usually on the great tidal waterways the first bridge will be found not indeed at the limit of the tide, for there the water would be too shallow, but in the last reaches. There are cases (Rochester is one) where the road has proved more important than the stream, where a bridge was imposed very low down in the tideway, but it has there fulfilled the same function of creating a market and a town. There are cases (Antwerp, Bordeaux, and Philadelphia are examples) where a secure harbour and good wharfage made the inland market and town in the absence of such an obstacle as the first bridge; but in the greater number of navigable rivers, even in so narrow a stream as that of Seville, the bridge makes the port and the town, as one can see by adding to the examples already given Nantes, Montreuil, Glasgow, etc.

There is a little note on the crossing of water courses which is curious and interesting in the history of roads. Since the crossing is always an effort, or, in economic terms, an expense, to be avoided as much as possible, the Road naturally avoids a double crossing, but, on the other hand, an island is a stronghold, and even a peninsula where two rivers meet is a potential stronghold. Therefore you have in the history of all early European roads a sort of dilemma, the first travellers debating, as it were, whether the occasion were sufficiently important to warrant the double crossing of the stream. At Reading, Lyons, Melun, notably at Paris, and in dozens of other places, the presence of the stronghold made it worth while for the Road to visit the place in spite of the double crossing, whether to an island or to the meeting of two streams. But in much the majority of cases the Road was deflected from its simplest line to a point below the meeting of two streams so as to avoid the double effort, and the occasion explains many a deflection which otherwise would seem to have no reason.