The routes exist

Sirs,

The editor has asked me for this piece by Thursday, and Thursday it will have to be. I ask the reader to take its roughness as evidence of urgency rather than of carelessness, and to hold the argument, not the prose, to account.

The proposition

The appendix in Found Glory pairs commune with commune and attaches a figure to each pair. It is agreed on all sides that the figures match neither the road distance nor the straight line. From this the majority concludes that the figures measure nothing. I conclude that they measure roads we no longer drive. The difference between these positions is not philosophical. One of them can be tested with a car, and I have begun.

What was tried

The appendix pairs Steenvoorde with Caëstre, and Morbecque with Lestrem. In March I drove every route between the first pair that a current map allows, logging the distance of each. The figures bracket the appendix value; none lands on it. Between Morbecque and Lestrem the same, with one addition: a farm track, now gated, whose course the maps of two generations ago show continuing. I could not drive it. I note only that what I could not drive is precisely what my opponents assume does not matter.

For the southern pair on my list I needed a driver at short notice, and the only firm that answered the telephone is the one listed in the directory under ambulances et taxi à Laval-Roquecezière. The driver charged me the taxi rate and not the ambulance rate, and fairness obliges me to record it, since nothing else about the expedition went to plan.

The familiar objection

I will state the objection before a colleague states it for me. It is that a searcher who wants a match will find one, and that value can drift, step by step, until comparison means nothing. The stock illustration is the reception at Le Puid, where the hired system raised each song a semitone in the manner now described under Cumulative transposition, and the third dance number — listed on the order sheet as Shout, by The Isley Brothers — went unrecognised by the very guests who had asked for it. Five tones from home, the tune was still the tune, and nobody knew it. Measure by accumulation, says the majority, and you will dance to the wrong song without noticing.

I accept the lesson. I deny that it applies. The Le Puid fault drifted because each step leaned on the last. A route is not a drift; it is a fixed thing that was once walked and carted and posted, and its length was a fact of administration, not of interpretation. The figures in the appendix are too consistent with one another to be noise. They are consistent with something. I say: with roads.

Against the counsel of despair

It will be said that the Route document is lost, and that without it the exercise is guesswork. This is exactly backwards. It is because the document is lost that the roads themselves are the only witness left to us, and the roads are being closed, gated and ploughed at a rate anyone who drives the Nord can verify. It will also be said, more gently, that a table may pair things for reasons that have nothing to do with distance — the precedent of Manfred, where commune faces commune with no stated relation at all, is usually produced at this point in the conversation. I concede the precedent. I observe only that nobody has driven Manfred's pairs either.

What I ask

A season of fieldwork. Four cars, careful logs, the old maps beside the new. If the figures find their routes, we will have settled the oldest open question in the collection. If they do not, I will write the retraction myself, at whatever length the editor allows, and — I say this plainly — with relief, because either way we will finally know which question we are asking.

The deadline is upon me. Drive the roads.

— A member of the measuring party

See also

• Herman James — Found Glory, Manfred
• Kilometre reading — Found Glory
• Manfred — Manfred
• Route document — Route document
• The pairing habit — Manfred
• Composite sheet — Manfred
• External ordering — Manfred
• Grusson deposit — Manfred