XVIII On Heads in General
The earliest human tools were weapons too, mere sticks and stones; and perhaps the earliest great discovery, before the invention of fire and in days of infinite antiquity, was the importance of heads.
The value of the discovery was due to the natural weakness of our limbs and teeth and nails. The other beasts were better provided with natural weapons and neither needed tools nor made them. The importance of heads did not concern them at all. The lions and tigers, who are regularly killing men and cattle in the way of business, do it as we kill fowls, by a sudden jerk of the neck. They have other ways, but they seem to like that best, as Homer noticed, and we can see to-day. See Pope’s translation, Iliad, v. 206, etc.:
“... When the lordly lion seeks his food
Where grazing heifers range the lonely wood,
He leaps among them with a furious bound,
Bends their strong necks and tears them to the ground....”
That is exactly the principle of the improved drop of the modern hangman, and swift and painless enough to please the most humane; but it needs a greatly superior force. The hangman is magnificent; but he is not war. Herein lay the importance of the discovery that hitting the head could stun and kill. Thereby the primitive sticks, by which our long-forgotten ancestors straightened their backs and stiffened their feeble knees, became clubs; and men began to face the lions in their path, and other enemies.
But for this great discovery we would have remained as restricted in diet and outlook as the chimpanzees. Whether tending cattle or cultivating the ground, men must be ready and able to take the open field and hold their own against all comers.
Accordingly, we find that the discovery was familiar in the remotest of recorded times. The wearing of helmets is a fashion as ancient as civilisation itself. The Rig-Veda Aryans had helmets, and the Homeric Greeks, and in the ancient classical Odes (iv, 2, 4, 5) a Chinese poet, perhaps coeval with Homer, tells of a potentate:
“He’s thirty thousand men afoot,
Who handsome helmets wear,
With shells and bright vermilion strings
That flutter in the air,”
thus anticipating the “red coats” of England. Indeed, that is not the only coincidence of old and new. The Homeric chiefs went among their men, in times of confusion, striking right and left with effective, home-made sceptres of wood, like modern policemen with their truncheons. The helmets of the police make the likeness almost palpable.
In the House of Commons a touching medieval survival is the wearing of hats. It comes down from the days when the steel-cap clapped on the head was the first step in a breach of the peace, and the head uncovered was the silent, unmistakable symbol of the peace-making speech, the soft words to turn away wrath. Little as he thinks of it, the member, who takes off his hat and stands up to speak, is led by a beautiful old custom to assume an attitude such as Themistocles has been admired for expressing, when violence was offered him in council, and he said, “Strike, but hear me.” Meanwhile, upon the table lies the unwieldy metal bauble, meant to represent the mace or loaded stick of the Speaker, who presides and makes no speech, but silently tables his tool as if intimating, “My voice keeps order and my club gives law.”
Every other mace as well as his, and every sceptre and staff of office, is merely a sophisticated emblem of the original reality, which is a common stick. The weapons of ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans are ancient indeed compared to anything in Europe; but they are modern things, as of yesterday, compared to the cudgel from the woods. And what is perhaps the most remarkable fact of all, while fashions change in war-tackle as in ladies’ dresses, the primitive cudgel abides the same; and under primitive conditions it is wielded to-day by the hands of contemporary men, exactly as it was wielded by our forefathers, who preceded history so far that, in our books, we speak of them as “missing.” We mean no harm, and we shall, all of us, be missing some day. So there has always appeared to me to be an antiquarian interest in what is certainly, for other reasons too, the best leopard story I know.
In 1886 a Burman farmer was working in his fields, about twenty miles from Thayetmyo, in Lower Burma, and noticed a leopard seize and carry away a calf. He picked up a stick and ran after it, shouting and waving the stick. The leopard saw him and paused and looked at him; but did not drop its prey, as the man had hoped. He fingered the stick in his hands, not taking his eyes off the enemy, and felt, to his joy, that it was a “male bamboo,” a bamboo solid inside, a very strong and formidable cudgel, light enough to handle quickly and heavy enough to kill a man or stun an ox.
They continued to eye each other askance, he and the leopard. He would have been happy to see it drop the veal and go. It would have been well content to depart without hurting him. But to go away supperless was not its intention, and to let it take away his calf was not his.
It was interesting to study how they had manoeuvred, the leopard trying to reach cover without approaching the man, and the man to prevent that, without risking an encounter face to face. This lasted long. There was plenty of active patience on both sides; and strategy so admirable that I afterwards regretted that I did not make a plan of the ground and record it all. At length the leopard ventured a bound over a bush and the man came within reach of it sideways, and lifting high his “male bamboo,” he dealt his first smashing blow on the skull. Everything turned on that. To fail to stun the leopard would have been most dangerous. But he did not fail. He stunned it; and, with a shower of rapidly-repeated blows, he killed it, and not only saved his veal, but also earned the twenty rupees reward that is always payable for killing a leopard. Surely it never was better earned.
I happened to be in charge of the office of the Deputy Commissioner at Thayetmyo, when he came for his reward, and held the inquiry myself. I noted the details carefully, because friends in the station, one of them a veteran who had been a quarter of a century in India, had nothing to tell to equal it; and, in the twenty-three years that have passed since then, during which I have heard on the average more than one leopard anecdote a month, I have never been able to verify anything so good as this.