(Tale 6) HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID 

On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with unceasing clamor and strife.  The heart of the peninsula, quite one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren, melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his endless stocking.  The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking, together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and was thought capable of sustaining.  A great change has taken place within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot of Denmark.  The story of that unique achievement reads like the tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years' sleep by the kiss of her lover prince.  The prince who awoke the slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.  

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit.  Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains.  Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall.  Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the pitiless west wind.  On the barrows where the vikings sleep their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the universal blight.  Over it all broods the silence of the desert, drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift way to the secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and anemone hide under the heather, witness that forests grew here in the long ago.  In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a strange pageant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea and shore, forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and castles and spires of distant churches—the witchery of the heath that speaks in the tales and superstitions of its simple people.  High in the blue soars the lark, singing its song of home and hope to its nesting mate.  This is the heath which, denying to the hardest toil all but the barest living, has given of its poetry to the Danish tongue some of its sweetest songs.  

But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil.  The heath had known such in the dim past.  It had not always been a desert.  The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients, which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages stood, bear witness to it.  Great battles account for their share, and some of them were fought in historic times.  On Grathe Heath the young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend.  Alone and hunted, the beaten man sought refuge, Saxo tells us, behind a stump, where he was found and slain by one of the King's axemen.  A chapel was built on the spot.  More than seven centuries later (in 1892) they dug there, and found the bones of a man with skull split in two.  

The stump behind which the wretched Svend hid was probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor.  In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago.  The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast from the North Sea.  There is one such thicket near the hamlet of Taulund—the name itself tells of long-forgotten groves—and the story runs among the people yet that once squirrels jumped from tree to tree without touching ground all the way from Taulund to Gjellerup church, a stretch of more than five miles to which the wild things of the woods have long been strangers.  In the shelter of the old forests men dwelt through ages, and made the land yield them a living.  Some cairns that have been explored span over more than a thousand years.  They were built in the stone age, and served the people of the bronze and iron ages successively as burial-places, doubtless the same tribes who thus occupied their homesteads from generation to generation.  That they were farmers, not nomads, is proved by the clear impression of grains of wheat and barley in their burial urns.  The seeds strayed into the clay and were burned away, but the impression abides, and tells the story.  

Clear down to historic times there was a thrifty population in many of the now barren spots.  But a change was slowly creeping over the landscape.  The country was torn by long and bloody wars.  The big men fought for the land and the little ones paid the score, as they always do.  They were hunted from house and home.  Next the wild hordes of the Holstein counts overran Jutland.  Its towns were burned, the country laid waste.  Great fires swept the forests.  What ravaging armies had left was burned in the smelteries.  In the sandy crust of the heath there is iron, and swords and spears were the grim need of that day.  The smelteries are only names now.  They went, but they took the forests with them, and where the ground was cleared the west wind broke through, and ruin followed fast.  Last of all came the Black Death, and set its seal of desolation upon it all.  When it had passed, the country was a huge graveyard.  The heath had moved in.  Rovers and smugglers found refuge there; honest folk shunned it.  Under the heather the old landmarks are sometimes found yet, and deep ruts made by wheels that long since ceased to turn.  

In the Eighteenth Century men began to think of reclamation.  A thousand German colonists were called in and settled on the heath, but it was stronger than they, and they drifted away until scarce half a hundred families remained.  The Government tried its hand, but there was no one who knew just how, and only discouragement resulted.  Then came the war with Germany in 1864, that lost to Denmark a third of her territory.  The country lay prostrate under the crushing blow.  But it rose above defeat and disaster, and once more expectant eyes were turned toward the ancient domain that had slipped from its grasp.  "What was lost without must be won within" became the national slogan.  And this time the man for the task was at hand.  

Enrico Mylius Dalgas was by the accident of birth an Italian, his father being the Danish consul in Naples; by descent a Frenchman; by choice and training a Dane, typical of the best in that people.  He came of the Huguenot stock that left France after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and scattered over Europe, to the great good of every land in which it settled.  They had been tillers of the soil from the beginning, and at least two of the family, who found homes in Denmark, made in their day notable contributions to the cause of advanced, sensible husbandry.  Enrico's father, though a merchant, had an open eye for the interests which in later years claimed the son's life-work.  In the diary of a journey through Sweden he makes indignant comment upon the reckless way in which the people of that country dealt with their forests.  That he was also a man of resolution is shown by an incident of the time when Jew-baiting was having its sorry day in Denmark.  An innkeeper mistook the dark-skinned little man for a Jew, and set before him a spoiled ham, retorting contemptuously, when protest was made, that it was "good enough for a Sheeny." Without further parley Mr.  Dalgas seized the hot ham by its shank and beat the fellow with it till he cried for mercy.  The son tells of the first school he attended, when he was but five years old.  It was kept by the widow of one of Napoleon's generals, a militant lady who every morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats, and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was wont to do after a battle.  For the dunces there was a corner strewn with dried peas on which they were made to kneel with long-eared donkey caps adorning their luckless heads.  Very likely it was after an insult of this kind that Enrico decided to elope to America with his baby sister.  They were found down by the harbor bargaining with some fishermen to take them over to Capri en route for the land of freedom.  The elder Dalgas died while the children were yet little, and the widow went back to Denmark to bring up her boys there.  

They were poor, and the change from the genial skies of sunny Italy to the bleak North did not make it any easier for them.  Enrico's teacher saw it, and gave him his overcoat to be made over.  But the boys spotted it and squared accounts with their teacher by snowballing the wearer of the big green plaid until he was glad to leave it at home, and go without.  He was in the military school when war broke out with Germany in 1848.  Both of his brothers volunteered, and fell in battle.  Enrico was ordered out as lieutenant, and put on the shoulder-straps joyfully, to the great scandal of his godfather in Milan, who sympathized with the German cause.  When the young soldier refused to resign he not only cut him off in his will, but took away a pension of four hundred kroner he had given his mother in her widowhood.  If he had thoughts of bringing them over by such means, he found out his mistake.  Mother and son were made of sterner stuff.  Dalgas fought twice for his country, the last time in 1864, as a captain of engineers.  

It was no ordinary class, the one of 1851 that resumed its studies in the military high school.  Two of the students did not answer roll-call; their names were written among the nation's heroic dead.  Some had scars and wore the cross for valor in battle.  All were first lieutenants, to be graduated as captains.  Dalgas had himself transferred from the artillery to the engineers, and was detailed as road inspector.  So the opportunity of his life came to him.  

There were few railways in those days; the highways were still the great arteries of traffic.  Dalgas built roads that crossed the heath, and he learned to know it and the strong and independent, if narrow, people who clung to it with such a tenacious grip.  He had a natural liking for practical geology and for the chemistry of the soil, and the deep cuts which his roads sometimes made gave him the best of chances for following his bent.  The heath lay as an open book before him, and he studied it with delight.  He found the traces of the old forests, and noted their extent.  Occasionally the pickaxe uncovered peat deposits of unsuspected depth and value.  Sometimes the line led across the lean fields, and damages had to be discussed and assessed.  He learned the point of view of the heath farmer, sympathized with his struggles, and gained his confidence.  Best of all, he found a man of his own mind, a lawyer by the name of Morville, himself a descendant of the exiled Huguenots.  It is not a little curious that when the way was cleared for the Heath Society's great work, in its formal organization with M.  Mourier-Petersen, a large landowner, as their associate in its management, the three men who for a quarter of a century planned the work and marked out the groove in which it was to run were all of that strong stock which is by no means the most common in Denmark.  

With his lawyer friend Captain Dalgas tramped the heath far and wide for ten years.  Then their talks had matured a plan.  Dalgas wrote to the Copenhagen newspapers that the heath could be reclaimed, and suggested that it should be done by the State.  They laughed at him.  "Nothing better could have happened," he said in after years, "for it made us turn to the people themselves, and that was the road to success, though we did not know it." In the spring of 1866 a hundred men, little and big landowners most of them, met at his call, and organized the Heath Society with the object of reclaiming the moor.  Dalgas became its managing director.  

To restore to the treeless waste its forest growth was the fundamental idea, for until that was done nothing but the heather could grow there.  The west wind would not let it.  But the heath farmer shook his head.  It would cost too much, and give too little back.  What he needed was water and marl.  Could the captain help them to these?—that was another matter.  The little streams that found their way into the heath and lost it there, dire need had taught them to turn to use in their fields; not a drop escaped.  But the river that ran between deep banks was beyond their reach.  Could he show them how to harness that?   Dalgas saw their point.  "We are working, not for the dead soil, but for the living men who find homes upon it," he told his associates, and tree planting was put aside for the time.  They turned canal diggers instead.  Irrigation became their aim and task; the engineer was in his right place.  The water was raised from the stream and led out upon the moor, and presently grass grew in the sand which the wiry stems of the heather had clutched so long.  Green meadows lined the water-runs, and fragrant haystacks rose.  To the lean sheep was added a cow, then two.  The farmer laid by a little, and took in more land for cultivation.  That meant breaking the heath.  Also, it meant marl.  The heath is lime-poor; marl is lime in the exact form in which it best fits that sandy soil.  It was known to exist in some favored spots, but the poor heath farmer could not bring it from a distance.  So the marl borer went with the canal digger.  Into every acre he drove his auger, and mapped out his discoveries.  At last accounts he had found marl in more than seventeen hundred places, and he is not done yet.  Where there was none, Dalgas's Society built portable railways into the moor far enough to bring it to nearly every farmer's door.  

It was as if a magic wand had been waved over the heath.  With water and marl, the means were at hand for fighting it and winning out.  Heads that had drooped in discouragement were raised.  The cattle keep increased, and with it came the farmer's wealth.  Marl changes the character of the heath soil; with manure to fertilize it there was no reason why it should not grow crops—none, except the withering blast of the west wind.  The time for Dalgas to preach tree planting had come.  

While the canal digger and marl seeker were at work, there had been neighborhood meetings and talks at which Captain Dalgas did the talking.  When he spoke the heath boer listened, for he had learned to look upon him as one of them.  He wore no gold lace.  A plain man in every-day gray tweeds, with his trousers tucked into his boots, he spoke to plain people of things that concerned them vitally, and in a way they could understand.  So when he told them that the heath had once been forest-clad, at least a large part of it, and pointed them to the proofs, and that the woods could be made to grow again to give them timber and shelter and crops, they gave heed.  It was worth trying at any rate.  The shelter was the immediate thing.  They began planting hedges about their homesteads; not always wisely, for it is not every tree that will grow in the heath.  The wind whipped and wore them, the ahl cramped their roots, and they died.  The ahl is the rusty-red crust that forms under the heather in the course of the ages where the desert rules.  Sometimes it is a loose sandstone formation; sometimes it carries as much as twenty per cent of iron that is absorbed from the upper layers of the sand.  In any case, it must be broken through; no tree root can do it.  The ahl, the poverty of the sand, and the wind, together make the "evil genius" of the heath that had won until then in the century-old fight with man.  But this time he had backing, and was not minded to give up.  The Heath Society was there to counsel, to aid.  And soon the hedges took hold, and gardens grew in their shelter.  There is hardly a farm in all west Jutland to-day that has not one, even if the moor waits just beyond the gate.  

Out in the desert the Society had made a beginning with plantations of Norway spruce.  They took root, but the heather soon overwhelmed the young plants.  Not without a fight would this enemy let go its grip upon the land.  It had smothered the hardy Scotch pine in days past, and now the spruce was in peril.  Searching high and low for something that would grow fast and grow green, Dalgas and his associates planted dwarf pine with the spruce.  Strangely, it not only grew itself, but proved to be a real nurse for the other.  The spruce took a fresh start, and they grew vigorously together—for a while.  Then the pine outstripped its nursling, and threatened to smother it.  The spruce was the more valuable; the other was at best little more than a shrub.  The croaker raised his voice: the black heath had turned green, but it was still heath, of no value to any one, then or ever.  

He had not reckoned with Dalgas.  The captain of engineers could use the axe as well as the spade.  He cut the dwarf pine out wherever the spruce had got its grip, and gave it light and air.  And it grew big and beautiful.  The Heath Society has now over nineteen hundred plantations that cover nearly a hundred thousand acres, and the State and private individuals, inspired by the example it set, have planted almost as large an area.  The ghost of the heath has been laid for all time.  

Go now across the heath and see the change forty years have wrought.  You shall seek in vain the lonely shepherd with his stocking.  The stocking has grown into an organized industry.  In grandfather's day the farmer and his household "knitted for the taxes"; if all hands made enough in the twelvemonth to pay the tax-gatherer, they had done well.  Last year the single county of Hammerum, of which more below, sold machine-made underwear to the value of over a million and a half kroner.  The sheep are there, but no longer lean; no more the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous farms backed by thrifty groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the dooryards, heaps of gray marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water singing the doom of the heath in the sand; for where it comes the heather moves out.  A resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully forward.  Not all of the heath is conquered yet.  Roughly speaking, thirty-three hundred square miles of heath confronted Dalgas in 1866.  Just about a thousand remain for those who come after to wrestle with; but already voices are raised pleading that some of it be preserved untouched for its natural beauty, while yet it is time.  

Meanwhile the plow goes over fresh acres every year—once, twice, then a deeper plowing, this time to break the stony crust, and the heath is ready for its human mission.  From the Society's nurseries that are scattered through the country come thousands of tiny trees, and are set out in the furrows, two of the spruce for each dwarf pine till the nurse has done her work.  Then she is turned into charcoal, into tar, and a score of other things of use.  The men who do the planting in summer find chopping to do in winter in the older plantations, at good wages.  Money is flowing into the moor in the wake of the water and the marl.  Roads are being made, and every day the mail-carrier comes.  In the olden time a stranger straying into the heath often brought the first news of the world without for weeks together.  Game is coming, too,—roebuck and deer,—in the young forests.  The climate itself is changing; more rain falls in midsummer, when it is needed.  The sand-blast has been checked, the power of the west wind broken.  The shrivelled soil once more takes up and holds the rains, and the streams will deepen, fish leap in them as of yore.  Groves of beech and oak are springing up in the shelter of their hardier evergreen kin.  "Make the land furry," Dalgas said, with prophetic eye beholding great forests taking the place of sand and heather, and in his lifetime the change was wrought that is transforming the barren moor into the home-land of a prosperous people.  

To the most unlikely of places, through the very prison doors, his gospel of hope has made its way.  For the last dozen years the life prisoners in the Horsens penitentiary have been employed in breaking and reforesting the heath, and their keepers report that the effect upon them of the hard work in the open has been to notably cheer and brighten them.  The discipline has been excellent.  There have been few attempts at escape, and they have come to nothing through the vigilance of the other prisoners.  

While the population in the rest of Denmark is about stationary, in west Jutland it grows apace.  The case of Skåphus farm in the parish of Sunds shows how this happens.  Prior to 1870 this farm of three thousand acres was rated the "biggest and poorest" in Denmark.  Last year it had dwindled to three hundred and fifty acres, but upon its old land thirty-three homesteads had risen that kept between them sixty-two horses and two hundred and fifty-two cows, beside the sheep, and the manor farm was worth twice as much as before.  The town of Herning, sometimes called "the Star of the Heath," is the seat of Hammerum county, once the baldest and most miserable on the Danish mainland.  In 1841 twenty-one persons lived in Herning.  To-day there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome buildings, gas, electric lighting, and paved streets.  The heath is half a dozen miles away.  And this is not the result of any special or forced industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for an army of industrious men and women winning back the land of their fathers by patient toil.  All through the landscape one sees from the train the black giving way to the green.  Churches rear their white gables; bells that have been silent since the Black Death stalked through the land once more call the people to worship on the old sites.  More churches were built in the reign of "the good King Christian," who has just been gathered to his fathers, than in all the centuries since the day of the Valdemars.  

Bog cultivation is the Heath Society's youngest child.  The heath is full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the bog being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give in exchange.  With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken up the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North Sea coast.  All along it is a range of dunes that in the fierce storms of that region may change shape and place in a single night.  The "sand flight" at times reached miles inland, and threatened to bury the farmer's acres past recovery.  Austrian fir and dwarf pine now grow upon the white range, helping alike to keep down the sand and to bar out the blast.  

With this exception, the great change has been, is being, wrought by the people themselves.  It was for their good, in the apathy that followed 1864, that it should be so, and Dalgas saw it.  The State aids the man who plants ten acres or more, and assumes the obligation to preserve the forest intact; the Heath Society sells him plants at half-price, and helps him with its advice.  It disposes annually of over thirteen million young trees.  The people do the rest, and back the Society with their support.  The Danish peasant has learned the value of coöperation since he turned dairy farmer, and associations for irrigation, for tree planting, and garden planting are everywhere.  They even reach across the ocean.  This year a call was issued to sons of the old soil, who have found a new home in America, to join in planting a Danish-American forest in the desert where hill and heather hide a silvery lake in their deep shadows and returning wanderers may rest and dream of the long ago.  

Soldier though he was, Enrico Dalgas's pick and spade brigade won greater victories for Denmark than her armies in two wars.  He literally "won for his country within what she had lost without." A natural organizer, a hard worker who found his greatest joy in his daily tasks, a fearless and lucid writer who yet knew how to keep his cause out of the rancorous politics that often enough seemed to mistake partisanship for patriotism, he was the most modest of men.  Praise he always passed up to others.  At the "silver wedding" of the Society he founded they toasted him jubilantly, but he sat quiet a long time.  When at last he arose, it was to make this characteristic little speech: 

"I thank you very much.  His Excellency the Minister of the Interior, who is present here, will see from this how much you think of me, and possibly my recommendation that the State make a larger contribution to the Heath Society's treasury may thereby acquire greater weight with him.  I drink to an increased appropriation." 

On the heath Dalgas was prophet, prince, and friend of the people.  In the crowds that flocked about his bier homespun elbowed gold lace in the grief of a common loss.  Boughs of the fragrant spruce decked his coffin, the gift of the heath to the memory of him who set it free.  

To Dalgas apply the words of the seer with which he himself characterized the Society that was the child of his heart and brain: "The good men are those who plant and water," for they add to the happiness of mankind.