Holiday on a Battlefield

Frank Boreham

Frank Boreham was ordained a Baptist Minister but had preached before Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational and Church of England congregations for many years in Australia. He was the author of forty-eight books and a regular columnist for The Melbourne Agefrom 1936 to his death in 1959. This article is reprinted from The Melbourne Age, December 18, 1954.

He who spends his holiday on the beach spends his holiday on a battlefield; and if he keeps his eyes wide open, he will discover signs of conflict no less stirring and no less romantic than those that he might trace on the historic fields of Hastings, Bannockburn, Gettysburg, Waterloo or El Alamein.

He may not come upon broken weapons or men’s bones. The struggle waged around these rocks and reefs was a far fiercer fight than any in which mortals have ever engaged, and it lasted longer than any war of which the annals of history have any record.

It is on this battlefield that the land has fought the sea. Sometimes the holiday-maker may walk along the top of the cliff looking down on the pile of massive boulders that lie tumbled in picturesque and bewildering confusion about the sands below. Or, at low tide, he may make his way among those monstrous piles of splintered stone that lie, higgledy-piggledy, all along the coast. Geological immensities were “hurled to and fro with jaculation dire.” The earth shuddered under the terrific blows thus struck.

The wilden counter persisted day and night, summer and winter, year in and year out, age after age. No truce or armistice was ever declared: there was no discharge in that war.

Occasionally the attack slackened down, and the rippling waters merely lapped softly against the rocks. But the sea was only gathering up its forces for the majestic assault that was to come. And when it came, the huge breakers rushed in like regiments of cavalry charging madly at their foe, and each foam-crested wave hurled itself upon the crags with such fury that the spray dashed up sky-high.

Not content with a frontal attack, the sea adopts also the tactics of infiltration. Frank Buckland, the eminent naturalist, points out that the English coast of today is very different from that on which the eyes of Caesar rested. First there comes a sun-crack near the edge of the cliff; the rain fills up the fissure. Then comes the fronts. The rainwater, in freezing, expands and, by degrees, levers off an enormous mass of chalk. Down into the void tumbles this vast avalanche and the waves set to work to clear away the wreckage.

Thus it comes about that, in the end, the waters always win. Indeed, they not only win, but they win without sustaining a wound, a scratch, a casualty of any kind. Viewed superficially, the water seems so soft, so yielding, so fluid, whilst the rocks seem so impregnable, so adamantine, so immutable. Yet the waters ride victorious. The land makes no impression on the sea; but the sea grinds the land to powder.

Many centuries later, Job’s incisive observation gave to Spain one of her most brilliant teachers. The titanic obstacles against which, like the breakers at the base of the cliff, Isidore was beating out his life seemed as inflexible as granite. Resting beside a wayside sprint, however, he noticed that the constant dripping of the water had worn a cup in the massive stone on which it dropped. He saw what Job meant. Those drops of water, says Isidore’s biographer, gave to the world one of its greatest historians.

It is always by the gentle things of life that we are conquered. The foolish things confound the wise; the weak things subdue the mighty; the things that are not bring to naught the things that are. Revelation reaches its climax in the Victory of the Lamb. Ω

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. . . . This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.” —George Santayana, U.S. Philosopher, 1863-1952