Such criticism is parallel to what one has to say too often with regard to military history. It is essential to good military history that its writer should be absorbed in the combinations of the affair, and see battle and campaign with apparent indifference to either combatant, or, at any rate, with a major interest only in war as war. While the bad military historian is he who, however great his interest in the main affair, cannot avoid a Jingo note—or an anti-Jingo, they are equally bad—in his writing. It is the difference between seeing human events from above as on a map—which should be the whole business of an outline of History—and seeing them slantways from the ground, and therefore out of proportion. There, then, is Mr. Wells on one great chapter of History: Islam. He shows in it both his advantages and his defects. He is quick to grasp the real meaning of it as a social phenomenon; he shows admirable skill in simple and lucid concentration upon main historical features. But he also betrays here his two main weaknesses. He can’t keep off a petty and violent anti-Christian obsession which ruins his work and deprives it of any chance of permanence; and he shows occasional examples of quite startling ignorance in matters which are common knowledge to his educated contemporaries. CHAPTER XII THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES Mr. Wells’s _Outline_ continues in good proportion and lucid in his general description of what we call, in Christian history, “The Dark Ages”: that is, the period between the first spread of the Mohammedan disaster (which he, of course, regards as a benefit because it destroyed or wounded the Catholic Church in the areas occupied by Mohammedans) and the German capture of the Papacy towards the year 1000. The general tone is that of the ordinary textbooks written in the anti-Catholic vein; although there is a rather more violent irritation than usual against the Faith in Mr. Wells’s general position and occasional references, it occupies little of this division. To the errors I will allude in a moment, but I must first point out the merits of this passage which brings us up to the eve of the Crusades and takes us from the end of Book V to the midst of Book VI.