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Title: Miniatures of French history
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release date: March 4, 2026 [eBook #78114]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78114
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY ***
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
MINIATURES OF
FRENCH HISTORY
By
HILAIRE BELLOC
AUTHOR OF
“NAPOLEON’S CAMPAIGN OF 1812,” “THE ROAD,” Etc.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
Printed in the U. S. A.
D–B
DEDICATED TO
SISLEY HUDDLESTON
CONTENTS
THE FOUNDING OF MARSEILLES 1
THE FALL OF THE VENETI 8
THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN 17
THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 26
THE BREAKING OF ISLAM 34
RONCESVALLES 44
THE NORMAN SIEGE 55
THE CROWNING OF THE CAPETIAN 64
THE TORRENT 70
THE CONQUEROR 80
THE SERFS 87
JERUSALEM 95
THE LOSS OF AQUITAINE 104
THE PILGRIMAGE 112
THE TRIUMPH OF SALADIN 120
CHÂTEAU GAILLARD 152
THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING 161
THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS 171
THE TEMPLARS 178
BLANCHETAQUE 188
VILLE GAGNÉE 201
LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD 211
TWO SATURDAYS 224
THE FRONTIER 231
THE EXILE 240
THE MONEY-LENDER 247
THE CHÂTEAU 259
THE THREE PLACES: FONTAINEBLEAU, MADRID, SARATOGA 268
THE END OF CHATEAUBRIAND 276
A SOLDIER OF ’70 284
TWO MEN OF THE MARNE 293
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
THE FOUNDING OF MARSEILLES
(599 B.C.)
It was the women who made Marseilles, and through women did there
first come to this land writing and the living record of heroes, and
wine, and building with stone, and a knowledge of the gods.
For the Phoceans, a Greek people from under the sunrise, had sent
forth (many hundred years--more than five hundred years before the
Romans came to make Gaul) a shipload to wander and to find new land.
But that ship’s company a matron of Ephesus had gathered together.
She was their priestess, and her goddess was at the prow. And that
women thus led had come about in this fashion:--
The Phocean men having consulted an oracle, the oracle had told them
that they should send to Ephesus, where great Artemis, the sister
of the Sun, had her temple and her shrine. So the Phoceans sent an
embassy to the shrine of the goddess, and while they were there great
Artemis appeared in a dream to Aristarché, a matron of that city, and
said to her (standing by the bed with her hands uplifted), “Take one
of those statues which are sacred to me, and join you these Phocean
men under their captain, Simos, and his son Protis, merchants, and
sail with them to the new land.”
The long Phocean ship, narrow and lithe in line like a greyhound,
low in wall, shot forward under fifty rowers. She so roamed from
headland to headland westward all the summer through, and her lookout
peered for harbours that no man had yet taken, and for an open
emplacement where the new city might stand. All the while the figure
of great Artemis, the sister of the Sun, whom Aristarché served with
sacrifice, stood upon their prow, and all their good fortune in the
beginning of this thing was from women altogether. So they went on
from headland to headland, still finding every place of vantage
taken; and still shooting westward by day, anchored through the
summer nights under the shelter of some jutting land.
Though they had so sailed for many days through the Mediterranean
weather, they had not yet found a place for a city. Round the long
bay which the Ligurians see from their high hills above the shore,
round the bended knee of the north Italian waters, they found cities
and islands and promontories encircling little gulfs, but none that
would welcome them, and none standing empty for those who would seek
new land.
Until at last, when they had passed and marked far inland to the
north the high snows of the Alps, and when they had so divided the
waters westward for many days more, they came to a shelter cunningly
hidden by a god, but discoverable to sailors who had long known the
sea. It was a place where many might pass and never guess an entry,
but where one with keen eyes would discover, masked under a turn of
rock, the gates of a harbour; and thither the helmsman steered them
round with his broad oar astern, right round in a sweep (for the
haven is cut backward, looking as it were not to the sea, but back
again on to the land). And when they had passed the narrow gates they
found themselves in a clear, deep pool with firm rock all about and
riding for a hundred ships.
There did they let go the anchor, and came to rest after so long a
wandering.
About the shores of this perfect harbour they saw no men, or houses
of men, nor tillage of fields, nor temples of the gods, but very
barren hills high inshore; and the place seemed theirs altogether.
When, therefore, they had landed, still under the guidance of the
priestess Aristarché, and sent messengers up into the bare hill
country and the low, spare brush of that land, those messengers came
back to tell them that all this part was the country of a Ligurian
king, and this king was friendly to strangers, and his name was Nam;
nor had this people any knowledge of the sea, nor did they use boats
and sails and oars, nor were they jealous of their port.
But first, before he would talk of anything with ambassadors, King
Nam must give a feast; for he had a daughter to wed, and by the
custom of her people she must choose her mate at this feast and
declare him at the board. To this feast the Phoceans were bidden,
and their embassy sat, with King Nam at his side, having for their
chief men Simos the merchant, their captain, and the young man Protis
his son; there also round the board sat the chiefs of the hill men,
each from his tribe, for each was a suitor and hoped that King Nam’s
daughter would choose him. The name of that princess was Gyptis, nor
did she come to the feast where the men were, for she was a virgin.
But when the feast was done and the time for her entry had come,
the king sent for the princess and ordered that all should be done
according to custom. And she came into the room like one dreaming,
and she held in her right hand a chalice full of pure water, which
she was to give to whomever she would, or to whomever the gods
directed her. And that man to whom she gave it should be her husband.
Gyptis then, going round the board while all watched her, put forward
the chalice in her hand and held it out to the young man Protis,
the stranger from overseas; and he took it and drank, and the king
applauded, saying, “This thing was done by the gods.” For it was a
god that had guided the virgin, and great Artemis presided here,
though the Ligurians did not know her, for they were barbarians.
Once again, therefore, had the goddess worked by a woman, and the
chieftains from the hills did not complain, for they knew her
presence.
Protis, rising up and taking the cup, drank from it and confirmed
the espousals, and the Ligurian men swore firm friendship with the
newcomers, and granted them the shore; and, since a harbour was
their desire, King Nam made over this empty harbour to them, where
the Phoceans, with great rejoicings and thanks to the goddess, built
all that a city should have--a council-house, and a market-place, and
walls, and gates, and a place for games, and a stronghold also upon a
height behind the harbour, and temples for the gods. But their chief
temple they raised to Artemis, and put in it that statue of her which
they had brought from very far away, from the Phocean land and from
home.
When all this was done, and the city founded and the harbour ordered,
and ships sailing out and in, Gyptis and Protis, man and wife, were
saluted king and queen of the city; but she queen more than he king,
because it was the women that had made Marseilles, and they owed
themselves all to the goddess.
Now when Gyptis and Protis had thus taken their thrones to rule
over Marseilles from youth to age, they took new names as befitted
their new station and the new fortunes of the Phocean land, and in
these names they bore record of the great good that had happened.
For Protis, the lucky bridegroom, called himself Euxenos, which is
in Greek the “well fortuned guest”; but Gyptis, who had brought him
so great a dowry, putting off the Ligurian name that her mother had
given, put on a Greek name also, and called herself “Aristoxena,”
which is in Greek “the best of hostesses.” And she worshipped with
him her husband, and with all the Phoceans, at the shrine of Artemis,
which Aristarché served, the priestess of the city. And so they ruled
until they died.
This is the way in which Marseilles was founded, and thus it was that
the women founded Marseilles.
THE FALL OF THE VENETI
(56 B.C.)
Julius Cæsar had thought to have subdued all the country of Gaul and
all the tribes inhabiting it, and he had left in garrison, upon this
point and that, certain of his lieutenants with their legionaries,
while he himself went off to another and distant part of his
command--the mountains of Illyria, which overlook the Adriatic Sea;
and this was in the winter, fifty-six years before our Lord was born.
But during that winter time, when the gathering of food for the
armies had made the Roman officers in Gaul send out messengers and
embassies for the gathering of grain, the seafaring men of Brittany,
always in a way apart from other men, and hard, and keeping their own
counsel, and difficult to subdue, had secretly prepared revolt and
had sent all up the Channel past by what is Normandy to-day, and by
what is the Boulonnais to-day, and Ponthieu and the Artois, summoning
to their aid any of the sailors that would dare to come, men knowing
the rough seas, well provisioned with many ships. They sent also over
the sea to Britain for aid, and from all these parts upon either
side of the Narrow Seas they found alliances, for they were preparing
a great thing. Cæsar, far off in the south, heard nothing of all
this, and the great officers, his lieutenants in Gaul, were also
ignorant of what was toward, so silently and rapidly did the Bretons
work.
Until, as the year turned, young Crassus, who was in command over
the Seventh Legion and had cantoned it for the winter in the country
about the lower Loire, and who, like the others, had sent out his
messengers to get wheat from the tribes around, heard that his
embassy to the Veneti (by that name were these Bretons then called),
Velanius and Silius, had been detained, and that the tribes farther
on to the north in Normandy held also other deputies whom he had sent
thither to levy food. Even as he heard this, young Crassus learnt
from those whom the Veneti had sent to him with the news of their
proud act, that if he would have his legates back he must himself
give up the Breton hostages whom he had in his camp. Now these
Bretons, the Veneti of Vannes, in thus detaining the Roman officers
and in sending to their general such a message, knew that they had
thrown down a challenge of life and death against all the power of
Rome.
Out from that coast to the north and to the south of the Loire’s
mouth stretches for ever all away to the west the great ocean, here
stormy beyond most seas and filling and emptying the rocky bays with
swift irregular tides, and beating upon islands and many heaped
boulders of stone that are islands at high water, and at low water
joined to the mainland by spits of sand.
This sea the Veneti held, and they were the masters of it altogether,
for though their own land did not reach to the Loire itself, yet
their great ships were dreaded and obeyed for many a day’s sail, and
the rare shelters behind the juts of rock or within the islands they
claimed to be theirs, even when the land about was tilled by another
tribe. These great ships of theirs, which were their pride, stood
up like castles out of the sea, very high at poop and prow, and of
marvellous thick timber, with huge foot-square baulks and the nails
clamping them thick as a man’s thumb, so stout was all their building
and so great and heavy were their ships of war. Iron also--and this
seemed strange to the Romans and a sort of terrifying thing--were
their anchor cables, and the vast square sails, whereby such weights
of wood and men and iron were moved, were not of canvas but of hide,
another thing monstrous in Roman eyes.
Against this power of theirs by sea the Veneti were very sure that
the little men from the south could do nothing, cunning though they
were in arts, and always favoured by fortune in their wars, and full
of wealth, and coming--the leaders of them--from palaces for homes.
For the Veneti were sailors, and sailors ever believe that the sea
is wholly theirs, and is a certain defence against all evil and a
certain avenue to all good fortune. But the Romans were soldiers,
ignorant of the sea and fearing it, nor had they any fleet on those
shores, nor could they seemingly make one which could at all dispute
the mastery of the Atlantic with the great leathern-sailed vessels
and their high freeboards that could withstand all the anger of the
sea. And more than this, the Veneti knew what a labyrinth was all
that coast under the water of it, and how many shoals and rocks
there lay hidden by the tide, and where these lurked; and they knew
what fate would befall vessels that struck, and they knew the shoals
whereon their own great boats, flat in the bilge, could lie unharmed
when the tide left them, but which would wreck hulls too deep and
narrow, and ignorant of the peculiar custom of those waters.
To Cæsar, far off in the Illyrian mountains, this news had been sent
by young Crassus post-haste, and he heard it as he was setting out
to watch in Italy his rivals and his friends; for Cæsar, while he
conquered Gaul, was thinking much more of how later he might rule
Rome. He saw what peril lay to him and all his fortunes in this
sudden pride of the Veneti, and in all this rising of the sailors who
knew the Northern Sea from the Straits to the two Cornwalls. First
he ordered, and that immediately, the subject tribes round about
the Loire’s mouth, and especially those who held the valley of the
Charente and the harbours thereabout, and the men who lived upon the
banks of the Loire itself, to build a fleet speedily and to send up
such vessels as they had, that Crassus might have some weapon at
least to his hand, and he sent up from the Roman shores--from the
Mediterranean, that is--and from the Roman province which to-day we
call Provence, rowers and men skilled in piloting, and a levy of the
seafarers of the inland sea. But with all this he knew that he was
attempting a doubtful thing, for his ships had no great strength, nor
their sailors the skill of the Veneti, and their hulls were small
and weak; and as for the Mediterranean rowers, they knew nothing
of the Atlantic sweep, with its great rollers of Biscay under the
south-west wind, nor of the heaving of the tides.
Next Cæsar, when he had laid his plans for Italy at Lucca, upon the
road to Rome, came northward quickly into Gaul, and was himself upon
these coasts of the Veneti at the moment when spring breaks over the
wind-harried land and the wide heaths of the Bretons. And with his
armies he laboriously worked up the coast, beleaguering first one
stronghold of theirs and then another, but all the summer through
(during which heavy storms broke continually, for that season was a
wild one) he failed, and the Veneti kept him at bay. _They_ could
hold the sea in spite of weather; their stores and camps were on the
islands and peninsulas to be approached only by the painful thrusting
out of causeways from the shore, and when at last any one of these
should be taken the sailor folk had only to put their people and
their goods aboard and to sail to some other not yet conquered refuge.
Until he had the better of their fleet--if, indeed, he could ever
hope to master it--Cæsar must despair of conquest, and with this
successful stand of all the northern shores he would lose Gaul.
At last, towards the end of that summer, there came a day in which
his fortunes and those, therefore, of France and all the world were
decided. For a gentler air was upon the sea coming up from the
southward, and the Roman fleet, which wild westerly weather had kept
imprisoned in the Loire for all these weeks, could clear at last.
It was upon a day when the sea was thus friendly, but the wind strong
enough and steady to fill their sails, that the boats came out from
the Loire mouth, making for the open sea.
There is in that country a great slope of open land standing above
the sea and crowned by the old town of Guerande. And there, upon the
low heights that leaned back from the sea and that overlooked islands
and half islands upon the shore below and the harbour behind Croisic
(where now the salt marshes are), lay stretched the Roman army,
awaiting, helpless and as onlookers, the coming fight.
For as the light ships of the Roman fleet came sailing and rowing
round the corner of the land, and appeared in procession upon the
great open of the sea, from the harbour at the feet of the army the
whole Venetian fleet, two hundred and twenty monsters, with their
dark leathern sails and their enormous hulls shadowing the sea, stood
out, with the wind upon the port beam, under that same weather, and
marshalled in the open for the fight. It was not quite noon.
Commanding those light, swift, but puny vessels upon whom his fate
and that of all Gaul depended, Cæsar had placed Brutus, young, in his
twenty-ninth year--Brutus, his darling, who was later to kill him in
the Senate House at Rome. And this Brutus had designed, as his one
hope against his enemy so greatly stronger at sea, something whereby
he might board. For the Roman was a soldier, and sure of victory
with the sword. This something was an armament in his light ships
of long poles, to the ends of which were lashed curved blades--as
our bill-hooks. Against those high freeboards and against those
tall poops the turrets which the Romans might run up upon their own
decks availed nothing, and it was under the peril of a plunging fire
from above and at the cost of a slaughter of which we are not told,
that the southern rowers, bending violently to their work, shot up
alongside of their great enemies, now two, now three engaging upon
either side some one Venetian hull. The hooks ran out and up, the
blades caught the halyards, and the oarsmen, suddenly backing water,
cut through those ropes cleated to the enemy’s bulwarks; and here and
there, all up and down the line, the Roman legionaries, watching
from the heights upon the shore, saw the great leathern sails come
crowding down, and the crew beneath them helpless. And everywhere the
little southern men swarmed up the sides of the great Breton ships
and boarded; and everywhere the sword conquered, though the long
fight lasted through the afternoon under a wind that slowly died away.
Thus did Cæsar and his men see victory accomplished on the sea below
them, before the sun had set over the calm to the west.
When all was lost, some remnant of the Venetian fleet not yet
captured brought up their helms a-weather and stood to run before
what was left of the southerly breath that evening into their
harbours of the north. But the slight wind betrayed them, for before
darkness it had utterly died away.
Thus was the issue of the Western world decided, and soon after all
the land of the Veneti was in Roman hands, their great men put to the
sword, and such of their people as had not fled sold into slavery,
for a terror to all the other dwellers along the coasts of the sea.
THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN
(_November 11_, A.D. 400)
Where the river Loire runs shallow or suddenly rising over its broad
bed, broken by willowed banks of sand that stand above the summer
stream and are, in spates, drowned up to their topmost branches;
where it goes between sharp, low green hills on either side, wherein
caves are a habitation for men; all down its valley by Tours there
was a murmuring and a noise. It was November, and there were storms
in the valley. The suddenly risen water drummed against the wooden
piles of the long bridge of Tours, and was swirling brown and thick
up to the lower branches of the trees in the islands. Nor could a
boat go easily against it, though towed by strong horses.
Men were passing backward and forward to the north and to the south
over that long bridge of trestles from Tours, the town, with its
low roofs of spread red tiles, to the caves upon the farther shore,
where was a hive of monks: all out of their cells to-day and eagerly
hearing the news in the market-place. The very old man, Martin, the
bishop of the city, was dying at Candes, miles away up river. He had
not been able to come back to his own.
He was more than a king here, for he was also an ambassador of
heaven, and when he had gone along the streets muttering to himself
and blessing rapidly those who knelt before him, men felt that they
had met not a man only but a spirit. The Emperor’s Count who took the
Pleas was small before him. The city held to Martin, and it was his
own.
Its walls were filled not only with his long presence, but with the
stories, grown greater through days of marching, of his strange
missions into the eastern woods: into the Morvan, and the dark
Vosges; and of dead men risen, and of lights seen in the sky. Also
the army remembered him. He knew the quarters outside the walls where
the huts of the barbaric soldiers were, and whence passed into and
out of the gates of the city the gentlemen, their officers, marked
upon their armour with silver and with gold. The soldiers had both
songs and tales of Martin as he had been sixty years before, riding
at the head of a column in his purple cloak; and those who had
visited the German mountains and the valleys below the Danube could
remember the portents of his birth.
Up there at Candes he lay dying, with some priests about him and the
monks of a new house. He lay stretched upon a bed of reeds, still
muttering to himself in a sort of sleep, the very old man. They
watched for his passing as they stood around, and it seemed to them
as though heaven was bending and touching earth to make a way for
the ascent of his spirit. All the Church of Gaul was centred here in
his lean and broken body, and three full generations which had seen
Gaul changed from the pagan to the Christian thing. He still muttered
faintly to himself upon his bed of reeds.
Within his closed mind, which no longer received the voices of this
world, there passed great dreams or memories, and the perpetual
wandering over the earth in the pursuit of his Lord filled Martin
now, as he lay dying, with scene after vivid scene in which he stood
outside himself and saw himself, and remembered all his time.
He felt, as his mind so wandered, a strong horse beneath him, and
he was upon that western road which came up to the western gate of
Amiens, straight from the Beauvaisis. He was a young soldier; he
was not much more than a boy. Against the metal scales of his jerkin
the sword hilt tinkled as he rode; the air was keen with winter;
there were dark clouds over the east, and a great menace of snow. The
rolling upland was bare right up to the brick wall of the city. His
mount moved impatiently through the biting wind, and as he went he
saw, crouching at the gate of the city, that beggar man, the memory
of whose eyes had filled all his life thenceforward. He remembered
the look and how, with shame, but compelled by a fire within him (and
looking up to watch whether the guard had noted an officer’s folly),
he had quickly cut his coat with his sword and thrown the fragment
of warmth down to the half naked man. He saw--he saw the eyes still
following him through the gate, not only with gratitude, not only
with benediction, but also with prophecy, and he rode on into the
town, ashamed in his mangled accoutrement, hiding the cut as best he
could with his left bridle arm, but still thinking of those eyes. And
Martin, lying there dying after full sixty years, murmured so that
men around him could hear the words, “It was the Lord, Martin; it was
the Lord.”
Next he was in the deep woods of the Æduans, high up in the hills,
three days and more from posting-houses and from stone roads. The
forest was damp all about him. He was in a clearing with two priests,
his companions, and the wilder men of the hills were watching him
sullenly while he broke their uncouth idol with an axe and preached
to them the living God. But as he watched them he doubted their mood,
and as he went back down the hills he feared their trapping him--even
the chief whom he had baptized. Then all those trees quite faded,
and he was in a place where the magnificence of the emperor shone--a
huge figure, too strong and squat, with a bull neck corded, and the
heavy, flushed face of exaggerated command. And he saw standing,
richly clothed amid a group of clients, the eager, furtive, not sane
face of Priscillian, and yet he pleaded for the life of that man.
And lying so in his weakness and dying, his lips tried to frame the
cry which came but as a whisper, though a whisper shrill within the
soul: “The Church will have no blood. He is a bishop. The Church will
have no blood.” And again he was in the forum outside the palace
wall at Treves, standing ashamed and with head bent, defeated, while
the crowd came laughing and jostling by from the execution of the
magician. He stood there alone and baulked, knowing that blood had
been shed, and that he had been powerless.
Next, time rolled back within him, and he was but just free of his
uniform, still so very young and full of his first fervours, and
behind him were high mountains and about him the meres, the ditches,
the reeds, the low lines of trees, and the hot sky of Lombardy. The
straight imperial road ran right before him for a mile and more, and
he limped along it at the end of his long, lonely journey towards
the splendours, the high colonnades and the clangour of Milan. And
even as he went, wholly bound up within himself and considering his
mission from the Lord, he felt again that great fear which is not
of this world, and which stands at last on the threshold of every
death. His heart began to faint in him, and his thews were loosened,
so that he could hardly stand. There was evil all around, and that
awful presence of the Pit. Martin in his dream groaned and turned
upon the reeds whereon he lay, so that the priests about him thought
his agony had come. Within his mind he was still upon that Milan
road, and still the oppression of evil grew, and still the dreadful
mastery of the abyss and of things condemned. Then he heard once
more right through him in its deep tones, as he had heard it then
in his boyhood, the challenge of hell, bidding him answer whither he
was bound and what business he purposed to do. And Martin, as he lay
dying, was again himself of those days, and found himself answering
again from within: “Oh, thou foul beast, I go to do the work of my
Lord.” And again the mortal cold seized him everywhere as he felt,
vibrating through his being, not heard by mortal ears, the mighty
challenge of the receding ghost: “Martin, I will thwart you every
way, and I will defeat you in the end.”
The despairs seized him even as the scenery turned within his closed
mind, and even here, in the article of death, the old man raised
himself upon one elbow a little and stared all about. He had opened
his eyes. He saw the room and the priests about him; one moved
forward as though to touch him, but the others held him back. And a
young man but lately tonsured, an Angevin from the valley, said with
sobs, “Oh, my father, do you not know me?”
Martin, seeing that young face, smiled for a moment, but outwards
only, for within the terror had returned. Though he now saw real men
and the very walls of the stone room wherein he lay, and the true
sky beyond the open arches, a November sky of driving cloud, yet
was he in the presence of that terror, and he called out in a loud
voice, challenging it: “Thou foul beast, I say to thee again, thou
foul beast, what power hast thou over me? I have faithfully served my
Lord, and I have done many and wonderful things for Him.”
When the old man had said this so loudly, and while those about him
were drawing back, many crossed themselves, feeling a combat of great
power passing before them. They saw their father suddenly loosed from
terror, and his limbs relax, and the falling upon his face of an
awful dignity, which at the last relapsed into a stern but conquering
smile. And so he lay backwards and was dead.
That evening they said Mass, and they absolved the body laid out upon
a bier before the altar, and surrounded, as custom is, with lights,
and the women also sang. And when the morning came they put the body
of Martin upon a boat draped with hangings as fitted the greatness
of the man and of his office and of all the evangelization of the
Gauls. And certain skilful men having been chosen from among the
river people to guide the boat over the turning of the flood water,
they brought it down to Tours, and there they buried him amid a
great concourse of the people, and all his monks lamenting him from
the caves beyond the river. Then, when some years had passed, the
devotion of his successors built a little chapel over that famous
grave, and a bishop from foreign parts sent a sculptured marble for
the tomb, and later still another church was raised in memory of the
apostle. And one hundred years and another hundred years and another
went by to the added glory of his tomb, until pagan savages of the
north came and ruined it; and when it had risen again in splendour
above him, other enemies, heretics, came and ruined it again, leaving
it all desolate and bare walls, and at last only two towers of what
had been his shrine. But for the third time, and in our day, men
built the shrine again, and there it is, as you may see it if you go.
And so it will be, perhaps, for many lives of men to come--the Church
rising and falling, and the tomb of Martin continuing in the midst.
THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS
(_December 25_, A.D. 496)
The great plains of Champagne were white with snow, and the small
rivers of that land made little black ribbons across the desert of
frost. Upon the high hills that overlook the plain from the west the
deep forest of leafless trees stood out as black against the sky in
frost. The town of those flats, all square, with its low Roman walls
and plain arched gates, was dark against the snow in the midst of the
level. The straight arrow of the road making for the western gate was
dark also against the snow by the passage of so many feet and of so
many wheels and horsemen, for an army had gone past.
It was in the Christmas time of the year 496. The army was the
army of that king from the Netherlands, a leader of the Frankish
auxiliaries and their master in the forces of Rome. His rough name of
a Flemish sort his soldiers repeated as Clodveg, or some such sound.
For us and for history it is Clovis, and there followed him in that
band of auxiliaries men, some of his own small tribe which lay round
Tournai and the Lowlands, some from the Seine. Four thousand of
them, perhaps: a column marching to his orders and ready to support
his government, for government there must be.
Rome no longer truly governed.
Although these auxiliaries, like every other soldier, thought
themselves Roman indeed, and were citizens indeed, and used the
money, and when they could read could read only the letters of Rome;
and though, apart from the army, all that world in town and country
was Roman through and through, yet there went out now no orders from
Rome to Gaul and the north. The sacred town was far. No tribute,
though levied in the Roman name, went its way southward by the great
roads to Italy. No writ came borne by a messenger to the Counts, each
in his City.
Of that great body of arms which had been the pride and the
sustenance of society there was now left nothing but these chance
bodies, the auxiliary or regular, drawn from barbarian stock,
fighting one with another each for its leader’s command--and yet some
one must govern. The money that passed with the emperor’s head upon
it (the head of the emperor far off in new Rome upon the Bosphorus)
must be paid to an order, and some tax on it must sustain some
chief who could settle between man and man and could put terror into
wrongdoing, and confirm to a free man his brother’s inheritance and
the obedience of his slaves--yet there was still no government, nor
any Justiciar in all these fields of Gaul. But the cities as best
they could, jealously guarding their walls and arming their burghers
for defence, stood each alone and kept their monies for their own
chiefs; and the Counts, who once had been the officers of empire,
lingered on: or stripped of power to the benefit of some greater
citizen and wealthier, or still ruling, but ruling of their own right
and with no charter from Cæsar: nor revocable, nor truly appointed.
For fifteen years all up and down the open country in between the
woods, all up and down the old state roads still strong and hard,
from city to city in the vague shocks of the time, this garrison that
followed Clovis had triumphed. For Clovis the boy had led them first
when he had come out of the Lowlands, barely fifteen years, and now,
a man of thirty, he led them still. And it was with these his men
never yet conquered that he had passed through that Christmas weather
into the town of Rheims. He had come to assume government at last,
and since Cæsar far away no longer ordered, to take up the business
of ordering, between the cities of the north and among free men.
For now one hundred years had most men of the cities accepted the
Faith. And though amid the dwindling soldiery the gods of the pagans
lingered, and though the auxiliaries, barbaric like the rest,
followed, each group of them, the customs of the tribe whence it
sprang, and for the most part did not yet know Christ, yet as they
marched through that land they were marching through Christian land,
and by this time the feasts of repose and the songs they heard and
answered, and the rites of marriage when they would wed into the folk
about them, and the rule whereby alone their children could succeed
to their land when they had done with arms, all these things were
Christian. Stronger than the cities, much more real than the empty
name of Cæsar, was the Church; and in each city a great priest,
ordering the wealth of the clergy, administrating their wide farms
and their thousand slaves, speaking with ancient authority and
remembering Rome, ruled, and was a bishop. Of these the greatest in
that time was Remigius, whom we call St. Remi, the lord in Rheims and
the father of Champagne.
This man, whose judgment and whose word weighed much more with Gaul
of the north than many soldiers, had seen the young man Clovis thus
conquering to the east and to the west, passing through the gates
of the cities and breaking in battle the Germans of the Rhine, so
that from the day of his victory no more hordes came out from the
forests, where there are no towns, into the plains of Gaul. To the
south, in the name of Rome, there governed men who hated the Catholic
name and who had a pride in hating it, because in the days when they
had risen to power and to be kings (each over his body of garrisons,
in the name of the emperor) the emperor’s court itself had accepted
heresy, and the Catholic millions were despised. Here, in the north,
fate still hung doubtful who would seize power, and, if he seized it,
whether he should stand with the bishops of the Church or against
them like the southern lords.
Clovis, three years before perhaps, had wed Clotilde of great beauty
and young, and for herself Catholic, niece of the Burgundian king;
and when their first son was born to them she had him baptized as
should be baptized the son of a king (for Clovis was called “king”
by the Franks, the soldiers of his troop). But the child had died,
and in his death Clovis had learnt a terror of the Cross. Yet was
his second son also baptized with pomp, as though there were already
about this warrior, his father, something imperial. And this second
child lived. Then it was that in his battle with the German horde,
out near the Rhine and in the thickest of the press when victory or
rout hung even, Clovis made a loud vow to the God of Clotilde if he
should be victorious over the Germans he would follow Him. He had won
the victory, he had driven them over Rhine, and now at last with his
men he was riding into Rheims for the feast, and Remigius knew that
now Gaul, in the north, and as far southward as such armies could
conquer, would be governed with the bishops and with the Church.
In the Basilica of Rheims, round-arched and long, Remigius ordered
hangings of the richest dyes, come from the old time before the
wealth and order of the empire had failed; and round the baptistry
also he had the same colours displayed, and out of doors in the
keen air across the streets of the town, and with pennons in the
market-place, he ordered decorations as though for a victory. Pagan
men come in from the hills understood the greatness of the moment.
For all the history of France and the turning of it lay here, since
Clovis, who must now take up government in the Roman name, and
restore the fortunes of these cities, was to abandon the old and
powerless gods and to be baptized.
They burnt incense in the baptistry on that short winter day, and
lit a crowd of candles, making the round place glorious. But Clovis
thought of the army, and before he would do so great a thing he
appealed first to the soldiers (whom a chief must hold), lest too
many of them should regret the old gods. But those who spoke for them
bade him go forward, and whatever he did they would also do.
Then Clovis knelt for baptism amid those lights within, and Remigius,
the great bishop, said over him not only the sacramental words, “...
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” which are the
making of Christian men, but also those other famous words: “Bow down
the head, Sicambrian, adore what thou hast burnt, and burn what thou
hast adored.”
When Clovis arose from the fount he had entered the company of
Christian men. There were to be new things in Europe from that time
and for ever, because the Gallic sword, which is the chief maker of
Europe, had passed into the hands of a man so baptized. The proud
heresies of the south were to pass at last, and there was to go out,
even into the Germanies, where as yet were no cities nor letters,
nor the art of building with stone, that influence from Gaul which
has made of those forests an European thing. From this baptistry at
Rheims set out a new story for the West.
As for the soldiery, these too for the greater part (three thousand
of the men of his small army) were baptized when Clovis was baptized;
and the new men to be recruited into the host for the new wars were
to march henceforward in the Catholic name; and everywhere the
peoples in suspicion of their not-Catholic lords, by the Alps as by
the Apennines, by the Cevennes as by the Pyrenees, were to look to
the north and to the Franks for their sword and for their deliverance.
THE BREAKING OF ISLAM
(_October_, A.D. 732)
When Christendom was Christendom at last, and all seemed bound
together under one bond, the Emperor far in the East building his
great Church, the Pope ruling in the West from Rome in the name of
Christ, unseen lord of all Roman men; when Britain itself, swept by
the pagans, was returning to the light of Europe, and when even in
the Germanies, or on the edges of them, missionaries had begun to
do their work, there had arisen, by that mischance which prevents
perfection in any human thing, a new enemy far away in the desert.
In the hot sands of which Europe knew nothing, and which were for
century upon century a boundary to all Roman things, in an obscure
town free from Roman rulers, in a market-place of the Arabs near
the Red Sea, there had arisen a man who was to change all. This was
Mahomet.
Mahomet, acquainted with the Faith, selected from manifold Christian
truth what few points seemed good to him, and composed a new heresy
alive with equality and the reduction of doctrine to the least
compass; rejecting mysteries--save that of immortality. He denied the
Incarnation and left the Eucharist aside.
Mahomet had visions and heard divine commands. Stones spoke to him,
and he perceived the glories of heaven. But more than this, in
the desert places and under the brazen sun, he was filled with a
command to teach what he had seen and known. He must re-make men.
For this mighty task he found two mighty levers--brotherhood and
simplicity--and to these he joined the delight of arms. For those who
followed him were to be equal and to be brothers one with another,
and this particularly as soldiers; and they were to spread through
the world by the sword and by example the teaching that there was but
one God, and that all subservience to men or to the forms of men,
or the calling of a man a god, or the painting, or the drawing, or
the sculpture of men, was an abomination. This something, simple,
enthusiastic with the sword and proclaiming a binding equality,
rose from the desert suddenly as its columns of sand rise in the
whirlpools of hot air. It moved forth, as do those columns of sand.
It came in a cavalry charge with Arab horses, and it conquered
everywhere. All men who found it seized it gladly or submitted, and
the great prophet was not dead a hundred years when this Arabian
thing, riding out to destroy the Christian name, was hammering
at Constantinople in the east, had burnt all through the African
north, had swept Spain, had harried every coast of the Mediterranean
Sea, had crossed the Pyrenees, and was striking at the heart of
Christendom in Gaul.
Never had an issue so great been joined upon our western fields.
Never since then, of all the great issues, has an issue so great been
determined among all the great battles that our rivers have seen.
All Spain, I say, save the hills of the north-west, was held by
this new power. Everywhere our shrines were subdued and our people
despised, the subjects of these soldiers, when, from Spain as their
base and possession, the Arabs determined to settle the quarrel for
ever and to destroy the West in Gaul. It was the year 732 of the
Incarnation. It was just a hundred years since Mahomet had died.
Across the high heart of the Pyrenees run, side by side in two
gorges, two roads. The one is that which runs by the noise of the
river Aragon, and has above its summit the high peak Garganta; the
other comes by the Gallego, and has by its summit the twin granite
peak of the Midi. By these roads came, pouring over the high hills
into Gaul, the myriads of the Arabs. And as they came they cried in
every town of the plains that there was but one God, their God, and
our shrines were desolate. They destroyed our harvest, they burnt our
farms, they seized our citadels, they made still northward to decide
whether the whole world should be Christ’s or theirs. And Abdul
Rahman, the viceroy, led them.
So they rode in their white cloaks, the thousands of them, on their
light Eastern horses that were so quick of foot, and having on the
thigh their short, curved scimitars, and slung at their saddle
their small round shields. They came to the broad Garonne with its
vineyards, and Eudes, the Duke of all that country, came out to meet
them, and was defeated utterly. The walls of Bordeaux could not keep
them out. They surged into that town; they burnt its churches also.
The broad Garonne was no barrier for them, nor the Dordogne beyond.
They came up to Poitiers, and Poitiers first resisted. Its walls were
too strong. Abdul Rahman burnt the Church of St. Hilary without the
walls, then left that hill town for a further attack when his triumph
should be achieved, and led his myriads northward still on up the
great road to Tours. For Tours was St. Martin’s shrine and the heart
of Gaul, and there should the doom of Christendom be decided.
There was in government over the armies of Gaul in that day a man
called Charles, whom men also called “The Hammer.” For many years had
he warred with his men behind him against the other great ones in the
north, for he was the bastard of the chief of the French who governed
in the name of kings that were no longer kings.
This man Charles was forty-four years old, very strong and greatly
dreaded, and all the things that the French had done in the old
days he did, raiding in particular the Germanies, burning the pagan
shrines in their forests, and taking tribute from the barbarians.
Eudes also, in the south, he had warred against and defeated;
but Eudes, now in this flood of the Arabs, called to Charles the
Christian in the north, and Charles answered. He gathered universal
levies from all the cities of the north, and from the valleys of the
Loire and of the Seine, and from the edges of the Netherlands, and
the forests of the east, and marched as though with a whole nation
of men against the Saracens.
It was already autumn. Abdul Rahman was half-way come from Poitiers
to Tours.
The place where his advance was halted by the coming of the French
host is memorable.
It is a bare upland between the two rivers of the Vienne and of the
Clain, lonely, with few hamlets, and in the midst of it to-day the
ruins of a great Roman tower and the last traces of the great Roman
road. There, in that autumn weather, the men scouting before the vast
army of Charles found upon a Sunday evening the miles of tents, and
saw the troops of horses picketed and the sheaves of spears, and rode
back to the Chief with their news. There also in that bare plain,
between the two rivers, which is to-day as deserted as ever, was the
soul of Europe to be decided one way or the other, and the fate of
the Christian name.
The Christian men came in their dense columns over the bridge where
the rivers join. They poured into that peninsula; they also fixed
their camp from stream to stream, and their great body of heavier
horses, and their weapons, which were not spears nor scimitars, but
the long sword and the long shield and the battle-axe; and they were
summoned to the sound of horns and of great oliphants.
Now one day passed and another, and nothing was done; but at night
each of the hosts could see the fires of the other, murky in the
damp autumn weather, red against the low mists; and every morning,
as the late sun rose beyond the valley of the Vienne over the damp
fields of October through the fogs, the northern men heard the Arab
call to prayer, shrill and singing, and the challenge to their faith
and their name. And the Arabs could also see, far off across the
space that divided them, men differently habited from the soldiers of
Charles. They knew them well, for Spain was full of them. They were
the priests.
So one day passed, and another and another, and yet no battle was
joined; until at last a week had passed, and it was Saturday. Upon
that morning, then, the leader of the Mahommedans, looking northward
again to see what the camp of his enemies did, saw it covered all
along its front by one packed line, dense, and cramped together as a
faggot is cramped in its bond, all facing southward and hiding the
tents behind with their line: for this was the army of Charles, now
drawn up for battle.
There was a southern man, a Spaniard, who saw that sight, and who
said that the men of the north were frozen men--men fixed by the cold
with frozen faces, and he said that so standing all in line, not
moving at all, they seemed to be a wall.
Then, before such a sight, the Arab army moved and swirled; there
was the saddling of horses and the calling of the companies together
with the shrill tube, and the words of the East cried from one to
another, and accoutrement upon every side, until the light horses
and their white-cloaked riders were ready, some with the thin lance
levelled, some with the bared scimitar in hand, for the charge; and
among them many wore mail, fine and closely linked, and iron upon
their heads. But all were mounted for speed and for the rapid turning
of a horse this way and that. The line charged. You might have seen
the breaking of the white cloaks against those tall northern men,
like the breaking of waves against a ridge of rock that bounds the
sea. And when from that first charge they rode back, leaving the line
unbroken, then one could see, scattered everywhere before that line,
the bodies of men fallen, and of horses which the battle-axe had
felled.
But again those thousands charged, and again and with every charge
lost more, not breaking the northern line. All the short autumn day
was full of this fury and of these cries of the Orient, and of the
scurry of hoofs; and throughout the full hours the men of Charles
took the strain, killing and breaking the attack until, when the
night fell, the assault had ruined itself; and in the counting of the
dead they found that Abdul Rahman himself had fallen.
The night that followed so furious a day was a night of exhausted
sleep. The army of Charles woke upon the morrow to see the day
broadening before them over the plains still strewn with so many
thousands of men and horses dead, and of wounded who had barely lived
through the cold of the night.
As the early mist drew off they could perceive the Saracen tents
still standing as widespread as a great town, but they heard no call
to prayer nor any shrill trumpet, and they saw no horses at the
cords. Charles’s men were set out again for battle, but no enemy
showed--only the dead. The columns were marched across the field,
through the damp grass and stubble of it, all pounded into mud
with the charging and the charging again of such hosts of horse.
As they drew near, the skirmishers, riding ahead, challenged; but
there was no reply; and as men passed for loot from tent to tent,
finding all manner of wealth--blades damascened and jewelled in
the hilt, and silks of Asia, cloths, and carpets and hangings, and
ornaments of gold, and richly-painted parchments, the sacred writings
of these desert men--they found no one alive save here and there
some deserting slave who begged for mercy, or a wounded man still
breathing, but too near his death to have followed the retreat.
For during the night the wreck of that innumerable flood which had
crossed the Pyrenees in the rising of the year had drawn back south
hurriedly, leaving its train and its tents and its wealth to fall
into the hands of the French.
Thus was Christendom saved in the tongue between the rivers, a little
south of Chatellerault, and a day’s march north of Poitiers; and if
you go there to-day you will find the Roman tower still standing in
a ruin, and a little village where the left of the Mahommedan line
charged, called Moussais; and when you ask the people of the place
what they call Moussais, they will tell you, “We call it Moussais of
the Battlefield.” So well does a peasantry remember after the passage
of more than a thousand years.
RONCESVALLES
(_Saturday, August 15_, A.D. 778)
Upon the 14th of August, a Friday, in the year 778, the Vigil of the
Assumption, the great host of Charlemagne was marching out northward
across the burnt plains of the Spanish uplands to where, high against
the sky before them, stood the Pyrenees.
The Emperor that year had come down the valley of the Ebro and had
fought in that march of Christendom against the Mahommedan. He had
held, but no more than held; and now he was turning back home with
all his thousands, and with his great baggage train of loot and of
provision, with his nobles and his prelates and his barony, as it
says in the song:--
“Charles the king in a tide returning;
Charles the king and his barony.”
He was still a young man in the pride of life. He was still full
of his great business, which was the restoration of the world and
the pressing out of Christendom by arms against the barbaric German
to the east, and here, though here only in defence, against the
Mahommedan to the south.
It was from Pampeluna, a Christian citadel which the Mahommedan could
not hold, that the king thus set out to return over the passes to
France and to the larger land--to the places where there was grass,
and where the waters ran clear and brimming, after the treeless,
parched mud and the empty torrent beds of Spain.
So the whole host went northward in its interminable column, mile
upon mile. The camp that evening they pitched at the foot of the
mountains; but the Basques all around watched them with spies from
the hills, and envied so much wealth, and hated so many foreigners
among them.
Before the next day dawned--Saturday the 15th of August, the
Assumption--the vanguard was marshalled, and filed away upon the
long straight Roman road that goes still upward northward into the
summits, and when the sun rose it took full the limestone cliffs of
Altbiscar, which are marvellous under the morning.
It was not till all those thousands upon thousands had gone their
way, a cloud of dust behind them and the debris of their bivouacs,
that a smaller body of the train, the rearguard, was marshalled to
follow on. It had for captain and leader Roland, the Count of the
Marches of Brittany, and with him were others of the Court--Adhelm,
the chief of the royal table, and Eggihard. They had for their task
that day to get over the pass and follow till evening the march of
the main column. It was a matter, perhaps, of fifteen miles. Nor had
they any warning of danger, for they were not in the enemy’s country,
and the last of the Emirs was two days’ march behind them.
Where the Roman road between Gaul and Spain here crosses the
Pyrenees, the sunlit side of it upon the Spanish southern slope rises
most gradually towards the mountains, up a great shelving bank, as
it were, miles broad and a whole countryside in length. It rises so
gradually that men marching do not feel the strain, and an army has
almost approached the limit of the ascent before it knows that the
ascent has begun. For all that the shelf of land is lifted high into
the air, and the notch, which is the Pass of Roncesvalles, seems,
as you come on to it from the south, to touch the very plain. There
is, indeed, just before that notch is reached, one little rise of
less than a mile, which no man would take to be the passage of such
mighty hills, so slowly and by so much cunning of nature has he been
introduced to the high places. Here the woods are deep upon either
side, and the last lift of the road goes up through greensward, very
pleasant and cool after the dust of the plains. Before the rearguard,
as the horses of its leaders took this rise, stood the edge of the
saddle, clean marked against the noon sky--a crescent of wild grass
sharply meeting the blue. It was when they had reached this height,
Roland and his companions, that there opened before them the great
sight of the gorge that plunges down, a passage into the Gauls and
the larger land. Very far away to the north, a hazy line like the
sea, framed between two distant mountain sides, was the level of the
French flats and the Landes.
Down the sharp steep, on either side of the profound gorge, vast
beech woods hung, falling in billows of greenery one below the other
in the darker green of beech in August; such is for the solemn forest
which clothes all that dark ravine, and from its unseen profundity
there rises the noise of a torrent. This gulf is Roncesvalles. And
down the western side of the awful valley, drawn like a thread
through the forest, goes the old road, gradually lowering until, ten
miles away and more, it comes to the waterside and to the mouth of
these narrows at last.
By that road was the rearguard to go.
The noon woods in the hot summer weather were nearly silent. There
was some murmur of insects in them, but no twig broke beneath the
steps of a man. There was no hint of the many that watched and spied,
hidden deep in the undergrowth. The captains had loosed their helmets
from their heads, they had hung them on the saddle-bows as the road
went down through the beech woods; the shadows were cool. And the
companies of the rearguard sang in the ease of the descent, and the
drivers on foot were guiding their beasts, for the way was narrow and
precipitous to the right, where the ground sank to the torrent below.
One hour and two hours the column so went forward, with nothing
about it, as it seemed, but the silent mountain tops--the bare rocks
lifting up above the green of the forest, and the noise of the
torrent always nearer and nearer as they went downwards.
There is a place in Roncesvalles where the gorge singularly narrows
and the steep sides become precipitous cliffs approaching one towards
the other. Here also the old road has come down to some few hundred
feet from the torrent bed, and as the head of the column reached
this place the sound of the water was much louder in their ears.
Roland and his peers, remembering Spain, were refreshed, for now at
last they were in the gateway of the Larger Land--the _Terra Major_,
Gaul, their home.
Here, where the ledge of the road passes through the defile above
the river, it also turns, so that a leader looking backward does not
see more than some few yards of the column following him. It was in
this place, in the Pass of Roncesvalles, in the mid-afternoon I think
(seeing how their march was planned), that the disaster broke.
First came bounding down in longer and in longer leaps from the rocky
ridges, thousands of feet above, one great boulder. It sprang over
the way, missing men and beasts and wagon, but striking confusion and
fear. They heard it crashing in the woods below them, and breaking
through the bushes and splashing into the water at last. The column
was halted and bewildered. There were horses thrown back upon their
haunches and wagons slewed across the way, and angry calls from the
leaders to disengage the block, and the bunching up of those marching
on from behind, who had not seen what happened. Upon such a confusion
came a rain of smaller stones (but stones that could kill a man),
bounding down the mountain side. One team was swept away, its wagon
toppling after it, its wagoner pinned beneath. One file was cut right
asunder, and the cries of those crushed under the weight of the rock
made echoes from side to side of the gorge.
There was a little pause in which one heard the shouting of the
officers to rearrange the line, and mixed orders for defence in a
place where no defence could hold. Then from the far side of the
narrows, from the dense wood of the opposite steep beyond the stream,
came the whistling of an arrow, sharp, utterly new, meaning men
and men enemies, though not a face was seen. It struck a captain’s
horse behind the shoulder. The beast squealed and reared and threw
its rider, and then, still staggering upon its hinder limbs, fell
backward over the steep and was caught in the sharp edges of the wood
still screaming. That first arrow was a signal. There came at once a
flight of others, and another flight, and another. Men fell crawling
upon every side, and the narrow way was a surge of them struggling
for cover where there was none, or trying to climb over and around
their fellows and to hide beyond the bend. Into the midst of the
welter came a new discharge of the great stones from above, and then
with a sort of universal cry (all the rearguard of Charlemagne’s host
being now confused and hopeless) the forest awoke, the hills were
full of voices: and the Basques were upon them.
Roland of the Breton March, riding at the head of his command far
down the road and well past the bend, had heard the first cries of
distress and the first turmoil. He had thought that some blunderer
had lost his wagon down the steep, or that the column had received
one of those checks which, in marching down a narrow way, bad
management will give. He was for riding back at first when, at a
place where a level of grass breaks the rocky steep and leads away up
from the road to the left, to the heights above it, he saw issuing
out from the woods before him the press of the mountaineers. With him
was his guard and certain of his peers.
Before the shock came upon him he had looked down into the road,
which he could well survey from such a place, and he saw in a moment
what had come. He saw the summer sky of the afternoon, blue but misty
above them, and the deep forest which had been so silent all about,
and he saw, high in heaven, between the peaks, one great bird and
then another, slowly circling upon black wings. And he saw the whole
body of the rearguard stretched out upon a mile of the way, of the
narrow way, and everywhere dark masses of men not in the accoutrement
of the host, livelier, striking with knives, not sworded; and
perpetually, as men fell, and as traces were cut and teams destroyed,
these enemies would leap off into the undergrowth again laden with
booty. All the while there rang in that echoing place cries in a
tongue he did not know, and that no man knew--the Basque tongue, the
oldest tongue of the world. And urging the mountaineers on and on,
in rush after rush from the heights, in charge after charge from the
depths, was the little bagpipe of the mountains, screaming its war
scream--the little bagpipe of goatskin, with its two flutes which the
mountaineers threddle with their fingers, while their eyes gleam.
That was what he saw--the destruction of all for which he stood
responsible to his young king, who, in the plains below, had already
camped his great army after the passage of the mountains.
Men see such things manifold and disastrous in one manifold and
disastrous moment; and Roland had seen this in the moment between
his reining up upon the sward above the road and the charge of the
mountaineers against him. He drew the two-handed sword from its
sheath; he had not time, nor any of his companions, to helm; but in
some hope of succour, or in the determination to die, he formed them
into a little square against the onrush. But even as they formed they
were borne down. The mountaineers were upon them in a hundred, and
then in a thousand, stabbing with the short knife, and with three men
to take the place of one who went down under the long sweep of the
sword, delivered heavily from the saddle.
The beasts were stabbed down, and the riders, as they fell heavily,
stabbed upon the ground. It was a swarm of foot against few horses
that destroyed that knot of captains. Behind them the resistance had
almost ceased, the column was extinguished. Among the dead and the
dying, and the horses now no longer plunging but still and fallen,
the derelict wagons, full of the loot of Spain and of the provision
of so great a host, stood gaping for the robbers. The mountaineers
climbed with odd laughter up the sides of those wooden things, and
passed one to another, quarrelled over, fought over, ivory and gold,
and good wines, and salted meats, and hangings and stuff for tents,
and cloth of the Saracens, and spices.
When evening came on there began to draw away from that place of
death the thousands who had so triumphantly designed the surprise,
and the wreckage was left in Roncesvalles under the open night, with
its leaders lying dead round Roland, and their mounts dead also upon
that little place of grass beside the road.
They say that not one man escaped from the slaughter of Roncesvalles
to the main army, and to Charlemagne and to the Larger Land. But this
cannot be so, for from that dreadful place there went forth at least
such men as could tell the story and make it greater, until there
rose from it, like incense from a little pot, an immortal legend
which is the noblest of our Christian songs. Therein you may read
the golden story of Roland--how he blew the horn that was heard from
Saragossa to Toulouse, and how he challenged God, holding up his
glove when he died, and how the angel took him to the hill of God and
the city of Paradise, dead. And as the angel so bore him Roland’s
head lay back upon the angel’s arm, like the head of a man in sleep.
THE NORMAN SIEGE
(_Winter_, A.D. 885–886)
Just as the hard winter had closed right in, and the days, growing
shorter and shorter, were bitter under the silent cold, and all the
trees were bare, there came, rowing through the chill and swollen
water, and past the leafless forests of the western hills, up to the
very water chain of Paris, such a fleet as had not been seen before.
There were seven hundred at least of these broad ships of war, strong
enough for the seas, small enough for the rivers, and they had so
come slowly up the stream from Rouen, which had fallen that summer to
their arms. Everywhere, as they went thus slowly inland week by week
into the winter, the banks had flamed with farm fires, and the fields
had been ravished and men and women killed, for this great host and
fleet were the host and fleet of the pirates.
They were not Christian men. They knew nothing of the rule of Rome.
They came for destruction and to loot and to enjoy, and they were
barbarous. Before them all the land had bent, and yet they could make
nothing--only war.
Men watching this dreadful thing when day fell upon the 24th of that
November in the year of 885 of our salvation missed the glint of
light from the water. All the Seine was covered with their ships, and
with the more numerous barges of their provisions and their arms,
right away from this water entry into Paris to the western hills. And
at first it seemed that God Himself could not have saved the city.
For the suburbs upon the northern and the southern bank, upon either
side of the island whereon Paris stood, were open and undefended, and
though all who could pour into that small island were huddled there
behind the shelter of its wall, and were armed for the defence of the
bridges leading to the Island-City from the north and from the south,
there were only two towers or works to support the resistance--that
guarding the northern bridge, called the Little Castle, and that to
the south, called the Tower of the Little Bridge.
Within the city the monk Abbo watched all, and he has written it down
in verse for us. Nor was what he watched a small thing. Here was,
with Paris, France and all Christendom in the balance; and this swarm
of the empty northern savages about to extinguish the light.
Within, to defend the city, was first of all the Count Eudes,
the son of that Robert the Strong, the founder of his line, who
had fallen at Brissarthe, and beside him Gozlin, the bishop’s and
Gozlin’s nephew Ebles, the abbot of the great Abbey of St. Germans
outside the walls, all good bowmen; and under these the Parisians
were to make trial which should win--the little fortress of
Christendom or the black north.
When the barbarians had moored their vessels and established their
camp, and beleaguered the city all about, they made a great charge to
enter by the northern bridge, and strongly shook the Little Castle
which defended it. But they could do nothing against it, for the
defenders threw down fire upon them, and the best of the fighting
men were there. Also there were perpetual sallies from within. Count
Eudes, the lord of the city, rode out with his spear, and coming back
with pagans upon it, said, “I have game upon my spit.” And when the
assailants, tortured by the thrown fire, threw themselves into the
Seine water, the citizens mocked them from the walls. But the assault
was fierce, and Abbo in his tower heard even by night the whistling
of the arrows.
Upon the fourth day, when this assault had failed, the northern men
withdrew and were content to make a great camp over by the Abbey of
St. Germans to the south of the city, and to wait until they had
further prepared.
Then it was that you might have heard sawing and hammering all the
short days long in this camp, and seen great felled trees brought in
by wagons for the fashioning of the engines of war. The night fires
also of their feasting glared right into the city, and all the suburb
round about was burnt, and the church and the monks also, but the
bridges and their defending towers still stood, nor could the host of
the pagans yet strike into the Island City itself.
Two months thus passed in the working of the winter wood into engines
for the siege, until at length, with the end of January, upon the
last day of that month, the assault upon the Little Castle of the
northern bridge was taken up again: this time with all the new
things--the towers, and the catapults the pagans had fashioned; and
in particular they had with them a great ram which they had made.
Swinging it with repeated blows, they shook the wall, but still they
failed. And on the next day, and the next--that is, upon the eve of
the Purification and upon the day of Candle Mass itself--they still
thundered at the wall of the Little Castle, but they could not take
it. Only once their great ram made a breach, and those packed men
within saw the northern men without, all helmeted, and these, seeing
the armed men within, stayed and did not charge. In the night that
breach was built up again.
Then, the three days’ battle thus lost, the northmen thought, since
they had so failed against the northern bridge, to try the southern,
where a smaller tower was. For they were like wolves that prowl round
a house in winter, nosing to find if any latch has been left undone,
or they were like the north wind of winter, buffeting a house and
seeking some way in.
It had so happened that in this same week of Candle Mass the melting
of the snows up in the Morvan, under a breath of milder wind, had
swollen the Seine high, and the flood of it had carried away the
piles of the Little Bridge to the south, and had left it in ruins;
and so the tower beyond it, which defended it, and the twelve men
within, were left all alone. These the pagan host, having come round
to the southern bank after their defeat upon the north, challenged
and summoned, but they would not yield. Then the pirates, seeing that
this little band of a dozen were beyond succour, and that none could
reinforce them, piled wood all about the tower and set fire to the
wood, so that the stones cracked and crumbled, and that the beams
within and the roof were aflame. The twelve men within were forced
out by the fierce heat, but yet they would not yield. They got them
backwards upon the ruined ends of the bridge, and there, drawing
their swords, they prepared to meet any that should come against
them; though they knew that this was useless, for now there was no
defence left to flee to behind them (the bridge being broken down)
and many thousands of the pagans before, since the tower had fallen.
The pagans therefore summoned them and offered them life, and they,
upon promise of their lives, came up on to the land; but when they
came there the pagans, who were treacherous, killed them in spite of
their word. And the Christians upon the walls of the city saw this
thing done beyond the river.
There was in Paris a certain man of great birth and wealth, and one
of the leaders of the people, who had heard the perpetual cry of the
citizens against the Emperor, that nothing was done for their relief,
and that they must die unsuccoured. And this man escaped by night
and went off eastward to find the Emperor Charles where he might
be, and to bring him to shame, for if Paris fell the northmen would
ravish all Gaul, and Christendom itself might fail. The bishop was
dead of the siege; spring had come, and yet there was no message of
relief, but still the block of the invaders and a perpetual defence
of the bridges. One duke, indeed, whom the Emperor had sent, coming
with a column, had fought his way in with food; but there had come
no strength to disperse the host and the fleet of the pirates, and
once again the city was beginning to starve. Therefore did this man
of great birth, and a leader, leave the city to find the Emperor, who
should have succoured Christendom; and the man who thus left to shame
the Emperor into marching was Eudes himself, the lord of Paris.
He found his Emperor Charles surrounded by his Court at Metz, whither
he had marched back from Italy. The Emperor Charles was huge and
unwieldy of body, and he was palsied so that his head shook, and
he had no will. But Eudes spoke to the Nobles and shamed them into
marching, though it was not until July that they tardily agreed to
go westward, nor until September, when for now ten months little
Paris had stood up against the northmen, that the great army of the
Empire was seen marching up from the north and the east, until it
lay camped below Montmartre, not an hour from the town. Even here so
feeble was Charles that he would not fight when he saw the host of
the northmen. He lay there is his camp treating, and one that watched
him has written: “He did nothing worthy of the Majesty Royal.” And it
was October, and nearly a year since the Normans had come, before his
treating was ended.
The chief of the pagans was one Siegfried, who had sailed from
Thames, having gathered his men about him at Fulham above London,
after King Alfred had broken their power. Siegfried it was who had so
sailed with his followers out of Thames mouth and up Seine, sacking
Rouen and coming at last to Paris itself. And with Siegfried the
dull, palsied Emperor bargained, buying him off with silver to seven
hundred pounds weight, and shamefully permitting that heathen to go
east into the heart of Gaul and to pillage Burgundy.
So was the great siege ended and Paris saved by its valour and by the
valour of Eudes: but not avenged, because the blood of Charlemagne
had lost its vigour in his descendants, and the Emperors were nothing
worth.
But as for Paris and her lord, they now stood out separate from
these Emperors who could do nothing for them; and Eudes, the son of
Robert, made himself more great, so that when Charles the Emperor
died a year later, the great men met together and said to themselves:
“As for the Germanies, let them go where they will, but Eudes shall
be our king here.” And Eudes was crowned and anointed in Compiègne,
not two years after his manliness in the great siege, and being so
crowned he rode out eastward to where the northmen were pillaging in
Argonne, and finding there the body of the pirates he destroyed them;
and to this day it is remembered how powerfully he blew his horn in
that fight.
From him and from his father Robert all the kings of France descend.
THE CROWNING OF THE CAPETIAN
(_Sunday, July 3_, A.D. 987)
Let any one who would understand the fortunes of the French wander
for days in the wooded valley of the Oise. There great forests still
clothe the low rounded hills which border the widenings of the slow
river, where it saunters through its pasturages and its marsh, with
tall, delicate aspens in solemn lines to mark its passage. It is a
flat river floor of half a league across and about it the great woods
of Compiègne and of Coucy, and all the others that still bear the
name of their towns or castles, make a sheet of trees. That sheet of
trees may have been a wider thing in the old days, but it remains for
any one who will visit it (and it is a countryside that will harbour
a man for as long as he will, so broad is it and so deep) the memory
of that landscape in which the fortunes of his country changed and
re-arose.
But, in particular, the forest of Coucy and the depths of the tall
trunks understand how the lords hunted there when the Emperor was
still the Emperor, and before France was once again France. See how
there still remain in fragments the lines of the Roman roads that
led from town to town; all the towns that make up this countryside.
Consider Paris, one hard day’s ride away, two or three days’ marches.
Remember Laon on its impregnable horse-shoe hill upon the edge of
those woods, overlooking the plains to the east and the north, and
forming a bulwark and a stronghold for the last of the blood of
Charlemagne.
Then, in your mind, see westward and southward the open land,
Normandy and Anjou, the Island of France, the gardens of Touraine,
Nevers, the high Morvan, the Champagne, crammed with Latinity, and
the valleys of the Allier, of the Cher, and of the Vienne, leading
upwards and southwards into those dead mountains of the centre which
are the frontier against the south. Remember also the good lands that
flank Brittany, and that make an approach and a barrier at once for
that jealous, silent land. Do all this, and you will understand what
happened when the Carolingians fell, and when, in one moment, a new
line of kings that stood for Gaul re-arisen was accepted and crowned
in the person of its ancestor.
France would be. The Germanies learning the Faith, and informed by
the French, were still the Germanies: barbaric, lacking in stone
and in letters; lacking in roads. The Latin speech had not followed
in them the Latin rule, and the Church which had made them human
had hardly welded them into Christendom. It was not possible that
Gaul should any longer be confused with these, unless, indeed, they
would consent to be ruled from Gaul. That, in their newfound faith
and culture, they would not consent to. Yet the imperial line and
the old name of Charlemagne, now wasted for nearly two hundred
years, pretended to control the issue. But France knew itself
again--that is, Gaul knew itself again, through the confusion of how
many centuries, and a symbol must be found for France. The line of
Charlemagne was exhausted. It could present for claimant to universal
rule over the Germanies, as over Gaul, as over Italy, nothing that
men respected, no one whom soldiers followed.
But in Gaul itself was a family and a man.
That Robert who had died at Brissarthe, and who had come, no man knew
whence, but who was so strong, and who was called “The Strong,” had
founded lineage. It was a man of his blood who had held Paris against
the Normans. Men of his blood had claimed the crown and kingship
once, and had been a part of the Empire, and had yet dropped the
claim. But their great estate of land had grown and grown. Their
command over many soldiers had grown therewith. They spoke in the
Latin tongue; they were of us. And of all of those who were of us
they were the richest and, what is much more, the most captaining
family of them. Of that great line Hugh was now the man. For a
hundred years his father and his father’s father and his father
before him had been the true masters of those good river valleys, the
Loire, and the Seine, and the Oise. If there was to be government,
he, Hugh, must come.
Rheims of the Champagne, the town where Clovis, five hundred years
before, had accepted the Faith and made a unity for Gaul, had in this
moment for its great archbishop one Adalberon, a man very subtle,
and more learned than subtle, stronger in will than either in his
learning or in his subtlety, and perceiving future things.
In those days there was between men a division. The great were very
great. The mass of men were hardly free, and were all very small.
The slaves that had worked for Roman lords in generations now
half-forgotten, if they were no longer slaves, were still mean men;
and the few that could ride by the day through their estates inland
were great above all men--the great bishops, the great counts, the
men of the palace, and the masters of the countryside.
These, then--the Empire now plainly in default, and wealthy Gaul, as
it were, derelict, and the Germanies, in their barbarism, sheering
off--counselled what they should do. They met in an assembly, going
up the northern road from Paris to Senlis; and here there was
great tumult. For each man came with his armed men about him, and
confusedly they knew how mighty a thing was toward.
In that tumult it was Adalberon who spoke: “Charles of Lower
Lorraine,” he said, “has many to speak for him, and he says that the
throne should come to him by right of lineage. But there should not
stand at the head of this kingdom any but he who is great. Hugh, the
commander of armies, is known to you by his deeds, by his descent,
and by the armed men in his troop, who are many. If you will have
government, take him.”
In the further tumult that followed Adalberon persuaded, and Hugh,
coming from those who had saved Paris, and who had commanded armament
in Gaul for now so long, was acclaimed by the great lords as king.
When the time came for the anointing and the crowning, and for this
separation of France again from what was not France, this re-seizing
of the nation to itself, Noyon was the town they chose.
Little Noyon, with its vast arcaded church, strong and Roman, amid
the woods of the Oise, the altar before which Charlemagne himself had
been crowned. To Noyon they came in the midst of those forests of the
Oise, by that strict road of the Romans which bridged the river, and
which is but one of the many that there meet, as in the centre of a
wheel; for the dignity of Noyon, now so forgotten, lay in this--that
men could come to it easily, even in those days of difficulty and of
old arts forgotten.
In Noyon, then, was Hugh crowned.
He had no name but Hugh. Since, however, men must give names to
a family as well as to a man, all the generations after him have
remembered what his nickname was. For he had a nickname, this soldier
and lord, and from his helmet or his hood he was called Hugh Capet,
the man of the head covering--the man of the head or cap. And that is
why this family is called Capetian: a little cause for a great thing.
THE TORRENT
(A.D. 1030)
Down the mountain side there went in long procession, slipping here
and there upon the unbroken frost of the morning, jangling all of
them with bells, mules by the hundred--quite three hundred mules.
They that led them were short, lean men with hard, clean-shaven
faces, bronzed in colour, and on their heads they wore a loose, flat
cap that hung to one side or the other. Each man led his beast, and
each beast was heavily laden as it picked its way down the slope; and
here and there, sitting sideways upon her mount, was a woman of these
hills, holding in her arms a child. The sun had not yet risen behind
the red earth of the eastern peaks. The broken road that had once
been a passage for the Roman armies over the Pyrenees (and that was
now a mere bank, unsurfaced, down which the mules warily shuffled)
was touched everywhere with rime. For it was but the opening of
summer, and the snow still lay everywhere upon the high mountains
around.
At the head of the valley below, fixed in the narrow valley floor,
lay huddled and tangled together such a little mass of dirty brown
as looked like a fantastic chaos of rock. As one came closer one
could see that it was a cluster of human buildings--a town, but a
town so squeezed together, so suspicious of all around, so made for
defence, that, seen from the pass above, it was like the shell of
some armoured animal.
One street alone led through its houses, very narrow indeed (for
up in these mountains nothing goes on wheels)--so narrow that two
loaded mules could barely pass. And this narrow street, under the
first glory of the morning sky, which made a strip of light above
it, was full of the cries of sellers and of grooms, of the stamping
of horses’ feet, and of the innumerable little jingles of steel
which come from bit and bridle and curb, stirrup and scabbard and
halter-chain, and the rings of mail upon a hauberk, wherever men are
gathered together to ride out in arms.
For there was in this town an assembly made of farmers and free
men and one or two lords as well. They had come for the beginning
of the summer season, now that the crops were sown, to ride out
south against the Mahommedan, to see what they could see, and take
what they could take. It was for this force that the mules were
coming over the hills to provision it. A great train did every such
expedition need of servitors, and oats, bread twice baked, and salted
meat tied tightly round with strings, olives also, and oil and much
wine; four men, perhaps, afoot for one that fought on horseback; and
many of those afoot were half slaves.
Under the low, thick arch, where the track came in through the town
wall and became the narrow street of the town, swayed in the first
of that long procession of mules. To the cries of the sellers and
the grooms, and to the jingling of steel links, there was now added
the music of little bells. But dominant over all such noises, louder
than them all, and a background of sound upon which all this life was
woven, was the torrent swollen with the melting snow that ran beyond
the houses a few yards to the east, and filled the deep, cool valley
with its rumour. The name of this torrent was Aragon.
Near a wide and ancient door of mouldering oak, that hid a deep, dark
stable beyond, was a farmer from the Canal Roya upon his horse, and
he talked to his lord.
“Those of Jaca, at the beginning of the plain, sent in a man last
night to say that we could catch a few of them beyond the Peña,
beyond the high hill. They camped on the slope of it, marauding. We
should be upon them before the sixth hour. It is not many miles.”
But his lord, looking at the Peña where it stood, a grey wall miles
away, answered him,--
“Their horses are swifter than ours, and they go very light without
armour, God curse them!”
And he spat as he spoke of the Moslem.
Then the farmer said,--
“Two days ago they raided the farm of Peter, the free man, and took
his four serfs away on halters, running behind their horses, and they
burnt a rick of his, and behind them they left a coin. This coin I
bought of Peter.”
He showed it. It was a coin of the mint of Saragossa, and the lord
bent over his saddle and peered curiously at the Arabic script
stamped upon it. Then he made the sign of the Cross slowly over his
broad shoulders.
“These words,” he said, “are in the devil’s language, and with these
they summon Mahound.”
“Sir,” said the farmer, “some day some men now mounted here will ride
into Huesca and cleanse it of the infidel. There is a monk who lives
alone, and is a hermit up on the Peña. The Mahommedans fear him and
will not pass his cave, and God gives him knowledge in dreams. This
man is very old, and this same Lent he said (when he came down into
Jaca for the Adoration of the Cross and the Blessing of the Oils),
this very Lent he said (and from the altar, note you, by leave of
the bishop), that he had seen St. Lawrence standing glorified in the
air, who held a banner, and that Huesca would be ours and Christ’s at
last.”
The lord smiled. “These things are lies,” he said.
“Was not Huesca the town of the great St. Lawrence,” answered the
farmer doggedly, “whom the Emperor of the Romans, possessed by a
devil, roasted upon a gridiron for the Faith? Will he not lead the
host into Huesca at last? And then all the plains will be before us,
whereon we can call upon St. James, and charge!”
But the lord still shook his head and smiled unpleasantly.
“All these things are lies,” he said. “But whatever great lord shall
ride at last into Huesca for Christ, and cleanse it of the infidel,
shall not only conquer it for Christ but for himself. Sancho is our
great master, whom we serve, but whoever can hold Huesca will be a
little king all the same.”
The farmer looked back up the narrow street to the mountains, and he
said, “The lords come riding in from the Major Land, from the broad
Christian land that goes up and away northward for ever beyond the
hills; they come in greater and in greater bands with every season;
they are strong men heavily accoutred. With their aid we shall take
Huesca.”
“But this season,” laughed the lord again, “we shall not take more
than a farm, nor raid more than an orchard, nor carry much home
beyond a few apples, and a little wheat perhaps from the first plough
lands of the infidels in the plain.”
By this time it was full day. There was a new warmth in the air,
and the noise of the torrent seemed louder under the growing light.
The torrent, roaring southward, seemed, with its adventure and its
plunge, a sort of leader; and these mounted men, now gathering into
column for the raid, thought of the south and of the stony path that
led along its banks on, away, over the ford to Jaca: and thence
to the plains and the battle. The torrent of Aragon is a maker of
kingdoms and of soldiers destined to conquer. Though as yet these
Christians had but a few bare parishes of land, hardly held by day
and by night with arms, and the little town of Jaca only for their
bastion, yet in them all, whether doubters or visionaries, there lay
smouldering some certitude of future things, and a promise of the
reconquest of Spain beyond and of the freeing of all Christian land.
So they rode out, in number about four hundred and fifty mounted
men, with many more afoot that made a straggling herd about them and
behind them. So they filed out by the southern gate.
The priests and the women watched them as they went by, and so did
the children in the crowd. There were shrill cries of prophecy and of
warning. To the last of them that rode by a deacon held up the relic
of St. Lawrence, which was a piece of cloth from his tunic. The armed
man bent over the saddle on the near side and kissed it as he passed.
Their marching raised a cloud of dust that blew softly away to the
southward under the summer air, and in a little while the noise of
the horses’ hoofs was lost, and the little place was quiet again.
There was a woman, one of those that had ridden in with the mules.
She stood now by the fountain filling a leathern gourd with water and
crooning a song of the Basques. For she was of the Basque country,
to the east, an unconquered tribe. And with her was her little son,
four years old, who held her skirts and watched the cool, clear water
running into the gourd.
“Mother,” he said, “where do all those tall gentlemen go?”
“They go to fight against the men in white cloaks,” she said, “the
men who serve Mahound. They go to catch them in their camps, and to
bring us home good things--as it says in the song that we sing on
winter evenings,” and she crooned the tune to him.
The little child said, “Mother, what is Mahound?”
“Mahound,” said the woman, “is a great beast that lives in an island
of the sea. He has a head like a goat, and great shining eyes.”
The child looked at her, glorying and delighting to hear the story
again. “And are not his eyes jewels?” he said.
“Yes, baby,” said the woman, “great jewels from the East, such as
there are in kings’ crowns, in the crown of Sancho our king, or in
the middle of that cross which the archbishop bore before him in the
procession when he came down this Lent from Toulouse with the great
lords of the north who were riding to help Leon.”
“And mother,” went on the child again, “is there not a fire behind
those eyes of Mahound, and has he not great gilded horns, and does he
not prophesy from his goat’s mouth?”
He continued to recite all the tale that he knew so well.
“Yes, baby,” said the mother (the gourd was filled, and she was
leading him away by the hand), “and this beast is black all over,
whence they that worship him, the Moriscos, are dark also, and they
grin with white, shining teeth like his. And between him and his
followers and our Christ and His Blessed Mother and His Saints there
is perpetual war.”
As the child so babbled, and as the woman answered him, there still
ran, with its triumphant noise below the houses, the thundering
torrent. The little child caught between two walls the glint of its
water foaming under the sun.
“Mother,” he said, “what is the name of that water?”
She answered in a more solemn tone, “Its name is Aragon, a famous
water; the sick bathe in it and are healed, and from all time it has
baptized Christian men.”
* * * * *
When this child was grown a man, though he was a serf’s child he
became skilful in the riding and the management of a horse and in the
handling even of arms, which the young free men lent him for a jest
in the village games. So at last he went riding as a companion with
one from his village, and was enfranchised. And by the time that he
had taken his farm from his father and had himself bred a son, he
followed the Cid Campeador. At last he, too, grew old. He came back
to his farm to sit by the fire; and his son in turn tilled the land
of those few acres in the hills, and rode out every season farther
and farther south against the oppressors, cleansing the land. Until
there came the rumour of a great marching that was going eastward to
the Holy Places for the recovery of Christ’s grave, and this son of
his, following that rumour, begged of his old father a little store
of gold which he had put by, and went out himself upon Crusade,
leaving the old man by the fire in the Pyrenees.
THE CONQUEROR
(_January to September_, A.D. 1066)
William, the Bastard of Falaise and Lord of all Normandy, had ridden
into St. Germer four days before the feast, and with him a small
retinue very richly dressed.
Upon the day of the feast he stood in the ante-chamber of the
presence near the chapel door with but two to serve him, which two
stood behind and were humble, the one a clerk, the other a treasury
man but a knight. Normandy had on the sword belt and the sheath, but
not the sword. For it is not lawful to carry arms in the presence of
the crown.
William the Bastard of Falaise, thus standing in the ante-chamber
of the presence by the chapel door, was taller than his servitors,
yet he looked short, so round and bull-like was his head, with its
close-cropped dark hair, and so broad his neck and shoulders. In that
close-cropped dark hair one could see already lines of grey like
steel, for the man was in his fortieth year.
The two guards that stood before the curtains of the arch moved
backwards. An old man, dressed in the long tunic of a civilian,
which was embroidered everywhere with thread of gold, pulled back the
cloth, and William, striding through, saw beyond, upon a chair that
was carved and gilt for a throne, Philip, the boy who was his lord
and his king, yet no older than one of his own sons. The boy’s face
was heavy and not courageous, but his eyes had in them already that
look of patience and of knowledge which had built up the royal line.
William, Duke of Normandy, designing to conquer England, desired
from his soul to have all France behind him, and secure peace while
he was abroad: therefore had he come to the court of this boy-king
of France, his relative, to offer him the shadow of suzerainty over
England while he should grasp the substance of power in London. But
the boy-king had been warned and was old enough to understand the
ruse.
William, the Duke of Normandy, knelt on the second step of the throne
and took the boy’s hands between his hands and kissed his finger
tips. Then he rose and spoke of his petition. England was his of
right, and he would seize it as of right with his companions; but
he would not hold it against his lord, he would hold it for his
lord. Such things already Philip had seen in the parchment, and
he, William, Lord of Normandy, had come to hear the answer from the
king’s mouth. The boy shook his gold-circled head very gently, but
did not open his lips. Said William the Bastard, Lord of Normandy,
“You are my lord and I am your man, but, a little way from here,
where there are men that are my men and a land over which, under your
allegiance, I am lord, my armies are ready, and from my treasury
I shall have hired others from the east and the west, and even
from Touraine, and there are strangers from the south that will
sail with me; and if God grants me this kingdom, I will not hold
it as king--God forbid that I should make myself equal to my lord.
Therefore the headship of this island (if God gives me victory) is
for you to take, King Philip, as a child may pick up a toy.”
Now when Duke William used these words “as a child,” King Philip
smiled with his lips drawn downwards, and nourished revenge in his
heart; for he knew very well what the great vassal meant, and how he
had cast a net to bring in the power of all France in aid of him, and
to have peace behind him when he sailed. He knew also, by wit of his
own and by councillors, that whoever sat in Westminster beyond the
sea could laugh at writs from Paris, and therefore, relaxing that
smile of his and looking, though not courageous, stern--almost as
though he were already a man grown--Philip refused again.
William, the Bastard of Falaise, Duke of Normandy, rose from his
knees and looked angrily about him, at the servitors of the Court
and at the guard, as he would look at equals, and even at the king
he looked as he would look at an equal, thinking, perhaps, that with
others to aid him he might dethrone that boy. But saying nothing
more, he bowed as a man should to his lord, and turned and strode out
again beyond the curtains; his clerk and his knight of the treasury,
that had stood there for witnesses, following him.
Then he got back into his own land, to Rouen upon the broad Seine,
where the woods are so deep for hunting all around; but he was for
hunting things that do not live in woods, and for a ride into a
farther place than the domains of the Caux country. And in those
woods for many a month men were felling timber and bringing the green
baulks in creaking wagons to the slips of the Channel shore, to
Caudebec, and to Quillebœuf, and to Honfleur, and to the river that
is below Caen--to all the places where men build ships upon the sea
marge of the Normans. And for three months or so he was summoning
by writ his men and their men’s men, and by letters with promise of
pay and of booty he was getting from off his western March the sad
Bretons, and from off his eastern March the pale Picards and the
Lowland men. Until at last he had in Dives mouth a very great fleet
of vessels large and small, the largest so large that fifty knights
with their horses and all their men could cross the sea thereon, and
the smallest boats of four fathoms long, not even decked, and stowed
to the bulwarks with casks and stores, and the garnered oats of that
year’s harvest, and wheat and little mills for grinding.
Men came to him from over the sea telling him how Harold laughed at
his claim. William, the Lord of Normandy, watching the sea from the
cliffs of the Caux country, found it still angry day after day and
week after week, with the cold north-east wind blowing strong upon
the land, so that he could not venture, and when he did there was
shipwreck; but his mariners lay apart after the mischance, waiting
orders, until at last he bade them beat up the coast to the great
and wide bay of the Somme, where stood his Port of St. Valery, half
sheltered from the gale.
Now some days before the Feast of St. Michael, in that same year,
the strong cold wind from the north that had blown so long died down
at last, and the sea heaved only and did not break, and a warmer air
came up from the south-west, like a piece of summer again. So that,
upon St. Michael’s Eve, Duke William put all that great host on
board, his fifty thousand men and his many knights, and his horses
and his provisions, and in the afternoon, the tide making outward
from the bay, all his hundreds of boats set sail, making a cloud
together upon the sea, and all that night, under the lighter breeze,
they ran for English land.
When the morning broke, which was St. Michael’s Day, they saw, high
and white in the dawn, the great cliff jutting forward, behind which
was their harbour; and one hour and another, as the sun rose, those
miles of sails drifted forward upon the flood eastward to behind
the lee of the head until, in the third hour of the day, the square
walls and the bright red roofs of a town stood close before them,
and inland beside them a great sheet of water, shoal, but with
fairways known to mariners, and a narrow entry from the sea; and
this was Pevensey Haven. Then the men, looking out from the baskets
on the mastheads of the great ships, called to the helmsmen below
to shift the helm by this board and by that, that they might follow
the fairway in. The smaller ships were beached within, all along the
level sand, until at last, what with the greater vessels lying secure
at anchor, and the lesser ones drawn up in rank beyond the high-tide
mark, all his fleet was still and his great host made land. This was
the way in which William, the Bastard of Falaise, Duke of Normandy,
came with so many thousands to the kingdom of England, which he would
win.
THE SERFS
(1087)
At Marmoutier the monks St. Martin had lived now for seven hundred
years, the lords of much land. Before their ancient caves in the
rocks, which had been their cells and which ran into the low cliff to
the north of the river, stood now great buildings of stone. A vast
church was there, round arched, enormous, heavy, and a great gateway
with its gate-houses, upon the summits of which men had carved two
angels, the one blowing a trumpet and the other sheathing a sword.
And all around were barns and further buildings, the habitations of
the monks, and their cellars, and their kitchens, their great hall,
their place of account.
In this last, the place of account, in a smaller chamber apart, whose
window without glass took in the full sun of morning, sat three
clerks, monks of Marmoutier, two young, one old. Now the old one was
the procurator, and his name was Augustine, for he was called after
that saint; but the two others were in the service of the accounts,
wrote at his bidding, and found for him what was owing and upon what
date, and from whom, whether in money or in service, throughout all
the wide lands of Marmoutier that were its dower. Of these two young
clerks the youngest, who was but a novice, still bore his name in the
world, which was Raoul; but the elder, who was already a priest, had
now his name in religion, which was Leo.
They were nearly at the end of their business and at the last of the
lists, for the morning was far gone, and very soon the bell would
toll for the chief meal. Outside the air was filled with the scent of
hay, for it was summer and the time of mowing. There was a noise of
scythes far off. It mixed with the running of the river.
There was a difficulty and a doubt. The old procurator, Augustine,
in the place of accounts that day had a troubled face, desiring to
do right by young Walter (Reginald in his father’s name), a keen
possessor, loving the land of his mother and his home near the
monastery of Marmoutier. For on that farm called Hauterive, in the
good pastures behind the dykes of the Loire, there was uncertain
custom, and upon the same land service to two lords, the monastery
and this same Walter (Reginald in his father’s name). And the
procurator would not decide until he had spoken fairly with that lay
lord.
For with the wealthy villeins upon this wealthy farm (which was full
four furlongs of the river side) all along the Loire it was a custom
as old as the woods that they should serve their lords upon Monday
and Friday. So much was sure. But there was a division among them,
some coming to the castle gate and some to the monastery gate; and in
the time of Reginald, who was cunning and not just, some had gone to
the castle who should have come to the abbey: which was a wrong. But
now that Walter the young man, the heir, had possession (his father
just dead), they could make a firm pact together, the monks and he,
and each have his due of labour, for Walter was mild and equable; and
also it was here at Marmoutier that he had learnt as a boy the Seven
Arts, and the Psalms as well.
When, therefore, he came in (which he did without retinue) the old
man greeted him friendly, and they sat down to the pact.
But still there was issue between them upon these wealthy villeins of
Hauterive.
“Brother Raoul,” said Lord Walter, “what now is written down?”
“Give me the parchment,” said Father Augustine, the procurator. Then
he said, “My lord, there is but one sentence as yet written here and
the beginning of the next, but more cannot be written until we know
that you will sign.”
Then the young lord said, “Read me what is written that I may hear.”
And the procurator read out,--
“We, the monks of Marmoutier and Walter, Lord, hold in common sundry
serfs, men and women, now to be divided between us in severalty.
Therefore at this present, being the 6th day of June, in the year of
the Incarnation, 1087, and Bernard being abbot, we have proceeded to
the division of the men children and of the women children of----”
Then old Father Augustine looked up from the parchment and said, “My
lord, until we have agreed, it can go no further.”
Walter, the young lord, rubbed his shaven chin with his hand, and
looked sidelong at Novice Raoul. For Novice Raoul, being the son of
one of the villeins adjacent, could bear witness.
Brother Raoul spoke,--
“The farm which my father has in villeinage marches, Father
Procurator, with Hauterive farm, and as a boy, before I came to holy
service here and to the special following of God, my father and I,
on those two work days of the week that are due to the lord, went in
company with those of Hauterive, who were more wealthy than we from
the goodness of their land; and I can bear witness to custom.”
“Of the elders,” here said the young lord, “there is no question,
for I freely allow what Abbot Bernard has written me and Father
Procurator here--to wit, that Renaud, whose house is called the
‘Village House,’ is due for the two days’ labour at the monastery
gates, and Guascelin, the other villein upon Hauterive land, is due
at the castle gates.”
The monks nodded, agreeing.
“We have but to agree upon the children, their dues of labour, as
they come to that age when the custom of the manor demands it. This
must be settled.”
“So we have set it on the parchment,” said Leo, the monk who had not
yet spoken. “So we have set it, lest, when they grow older, quarrels,
as in the time of your father, should arise.”
Then the Father Procurator spoke again,--
“If Renaud of the Village House chooses to redeem in coin, we shall
settle it upon our admitted rule, Lord Walter--two-thirds to the
monastery, one-third to the castle.”
“That would be but just,” the young man assented.
“He will not redeem!” broke in Novice Raoul quickly.
“Surely,” said his colleague Leo mildly, “he is rich enough! It
is the best land on all the river side, and there are one hundred
arpents of it, and it has a vineyard too!”
But Raoul laughed, remembering his father’s neighbour.
“Yes, the Serf has money lent out; but for that very reason will not
Renaud of the Village House redeem. For he loves the very metal.
Also he has other labour of his own cotters on his land. And when
his children grow up and pay their dues of labour days, Renaud will
be glad to see them go to the monastery gate or to the castle gate,
though he lose their arms and hands for that day, for he will say to
himself, ‘There they go a-saving of many pence in redemption, and
their food also this day they will have from the lord, or from the
abbot.’ He will not redeem! He will in no way diminish his hoard!”
“See now,” said Father Augustine, who waited every moment for the
bell and was weary of this long business over a small thing--“see
now, if we admit this rule of a third the matter is quickly settled,
for this Renaud has six children--two sons and four daughters;
Guascelin three, or four if you shall count a very young child still
in her cradle.”
When he had said these last words they all laughed, thinking of the
baby and of what haymaking it could do. Then the young lord, to save
them further delays, rose as to agree.
“Read me the list,” said he, “and take you in the one the first
four names, in the other the first two. As for the one that is in
the cradle, she can wait;” and at that they all laughed again. “It
will be many years before we need speak of any labour in our fields
from her. Perhaps she will wed out of villeinage, or perhaps with
her portion she will farm free land, or perhaps she will be a nun.
So engross the matter thus, and we will have secured peace and a
settlement between us.”
Then Brother Raoul carefully wrote the square letters with his pen,
adding, “We then have received for our lot of the children of Renaud
of the Village House one boy, Bartholomew, and three daughters,
Hersende, and Milesende, and Letgarde. And of the children of
Guascelin one daughter, Aremburge, and one son, Walter. A very young
girl child in her cradle is excepted from this allotment. She shall
be between us, if she lives, until some settlement shall allot her to
one or to the other lordship.” And with that his writing was done.
With these as witnesses, the procurator set the abbey seal, and
Walter his seal also and the mark by which he was known, and so was
the settlement concluded, just as the bell rang for the prayer and
the chief meal.
Outside in the warm air the noise of the scythe ceased to the sound
of the bell, and there was nothing heard but the gentle wash of the
river running by its bank of reeds--the broad river Loire, low in the
summer drought, and showing above its streams of blue water white
sand-banks sparkling in the sun.
JERUSALEM
(_July 15, 1099_)
It was Friday, the 15th of July, in the year of the Incarnation,
1099, and about noon. A little sun stood right up in the height of
heaven, blazing as no sun shines upon our tempered and well-watered
lands, for it was the sun of Syria, a burning eye.
The rolling upland was brown and bare, scorched for weeks; the
harvest long gathered, and all grass for forage lacking. Across
its sweep rose a little town of tents, deplorable with use, torn,
patched, and dirty; at long cords stood tethered the lean horses,
their heads patiently drooping in the heat, and here and there a gap
where one of them had fallen and would not rise again. Beyond the
camp a dusty, winding track, very wide, just marked by shallow ruts,
led away to the horizon and to the crest against the northern sky,
whence could be seen, very far off to the westward, the Levantine
Sea. Along that faint, broad line ominous wreckage was studded at
intervals too close--carts broken down, glistening white bones, and
little heaps of refuse which hid the dead. Of the millions that
had marched out from Europe three years before to the rescuing of
Christ’s grave, a handful were here, still breaking against the
long, low wall of the city. Of twenty that had left the pleasant
fields at home, in Picardy or in Touraine, from the Garonne, from
the cool flats of Vendée, but one had lived or had persevered to see
Jerusalem. And now for all these days the last effort had still been
quite unavailing. But it was Friday, the day upon which Christ had
died; it was noon, the hour of His Crucifixion.
In the camp, which looked southward towards the low wall of the city,
the serfs were now painfully bearing water up from the stagnant
pools below, or were attending the fires for the cooking of meat,
against the hour when, once again, as for so many days, the armed men
should come back at evening sullen and once again defeated; from that
camp, I say, the serfs could see, all along the wall, the assault
proceeding. Beyond, within the city itself, glaring in the intense
light, was the low, whitewashed dome, the Sepulchre, and Golgotha was
just before.
It was by groups that the desperate attempt was made, as it had
been made day after day during that intolerable heat of the Eastern
summer. One could see little figures running with the short scaling
ladders, bucklers lifted in a tortoise to shield the bearers; the
ladders rapidly put against the wall; men swarming up, now one group
just getting a foothold, but soon thrust back again; bodies falling,
heavy in their armour, to the ground; the ladders here and there
along the half-mile of front broken or thrust outward, and whole
lines of men that had mounted them crashing again to earth. While
underneath the wall, cowering close in the dead ground, free from
arrows above, were other groups that fiercely picked the ground with
their steel, and that thrust into the gaps faggots to which they
would set fire. The smoke rose, blackening the stones, but none
crumbled, and there was no breach.
In two spots near either end of the line great beams had been
mounted, swung on ropes from tripods, and these, with regular thud,
pounded at the lower courses of the huge blocks that built up the
rampart; while in one place a tall scaffolding, or tower of wood,
having upon its every tier a hundred archers and slingers, poured
missiles down upon the defenders of the battlements.
Far off as the camp was, one could hear above the regular pulse of
the battering rams a noise like that of the assaulting sea in a
storm when it bursts upon the shore and when the shingle screams
under the retreating wave. And the high calls upon the God of Islam,
which for now so many months and years had rendered a haunting sound
in their ears, pierced through the general din. Voices were calling
also from the minarets.
Very far away to the south, beyond the whole expanse of the city,
could just be seen a squat, strong mass of masonry overtopping the
houses. It was the Tower of David. And there these men, who were so
fiercely pushing the assault from the north under so intolerable
a strain of heat and clamour, knew that the men of Toulouse, the
southerners under their Count, were pressing and besieging also.
For beyond that Tower of David, higher than it and feathery against
the sky, was yet another tall scaffolding of poles lashed together,
black with tiny figures of the Christian soldiers, shooting down upon
the defence and attempting to master its fire. But of that distant
struggle no rumour could be heard; there could only be seen the
general movement of men against the sky.
The general tide of this assault upon the northern wall perpetually
repulsed, perpetually returning, sounded hour after hour. Noon was
past, and the seventh hour and the eighth. The dust of the conflict
had already mellowed the light of the sun, which no longer stood in
the zenith, but was partly declined. The time was near that ninth
hour when Jesus had cried out that God had forsaken Him, and had
dropped His head and died.
The men watching the camp, the serfs, listless in their fatigue and
broken by the noonday heat now past, thought they heard a new note
in the distant noises from the wall. One looked up, and another, and
there was almost eagerness in their gestures. Those with keener eyes
pointed to a place a little east of the centre of the line, where,
as it seemed, a blacker and a denser mass was gathering. It was like
a swarm of bees. They saw the little figures racing up to join the
edges of the rapidly swelling mound of men. The many ladders there
concentrated were hidden beneath this cloak and moving garment of
human bodies, and the whole surface of it running upwards in a slope
to the very height of the battlements glittered and twinkled, like
beaded stuff, with the points of steel, with the steel caps, and with
the little bristles of swords ever mounting.
The camp was afoot, every serf was standing and looking. The wounded,
such as could still know their names or the place in which they
lay, such as could still move, were warned by their servants in the
excitement, and crawled to the gaps of the tents. Such labourers as
had fallen asleep were roused and stood, in their turn, straining
their eyes at the wall, and one or two in their eagerness began to
run forward, unarmed as they were, across the brown, burnt earth
between the camp and Jerusalem. Was there a breach? There was no sign
of it. No crash of boulders, no sudden rising of that cloud which
booms up as from an explosion when a wall gives way. The regular
thud of the battering rams continued far to the right and far to the
left uninterruptedly, but between them this climbing, struggling,
increasing mass of men gave forth a louder and a louder note. They
were upon the edge of victory.
Then in one critical moment (it was just three o’clock) the
desperation of those cries turned into a very different roar of
cheers, and it was apparent that the wall was gained. One could see
the besiegers spreading along the height of it, to the right and
to the left, enfilading its defence, holding a wider and a wider
gap, and the swords at either end of the line hacking and sweeping
their way forward. And now (so many men having poured up the wall
and along it) scraps of the many scaling ladders could be seen,
and separate streams of men hurrying up them and reinforcing the
lengthening line above that held the battlements. Until at last all
the defence was brushed away, from east to west, and for a half-mile
in one unbroken series the Crusaders were the masters of the rampart,
and already men were hauling the scaling ladders over to descend
into the city beyond. The men at the battering rams ran hard for the
check-ropes, hanging desperately upon them to stop the swing, and the
thuds ceased for the first time in all those hours. From the wooden
tower also the attackers were scrambling down and racing towards the
wall, and bringing new ladders and climbing it, now undefended. A
lamentable confusion, masked by the screen of masonry, made up of
scream and clamour, rose from the streets of the city within, as
victory pressed on through the houses. Jerusalem had fallen; and
already the first man in the race had thrust his palms against the
walls of the Sepulchre, and sinking to his knees, collapsing, kissed
it.
There is in the hills that shut in the garden of the Cotentin, in
the depths of Normandy, a happy town with pastures and with orchards
all around. It is called the Silent Valley, Sourdeval. Here had a
child been born in the castle of the place to the lord of it, and
they had given him the name Robert, after the last great duke who was
the leader of them all. This child Robert, grown a man, had armed
himself and mounted himself, and followed the Crusade, and he it was
who sprang first upon the wall of Jerusalem on that great day: Robert
of Sourdeval, in the country of Avranches, under the shadow of the
shrine which is called “St. Michael in peril of the sea.” But even as
he leapt upon the wall, and in the moment of his exaltation, he saw
southward, upon the Tower of David, a great banner suddenly catching
the sun, and he knew that it was the banner of Toulouse. From the
south also the city had been forced, and he cried as he saw that
banner, “Ville gagnée!”
* * * * *
Of the men who had followed and endured till the end and had entered
Jerusalem, one from the Pyrenees, three years later, came home. A
ship had taken him across the seas, pirates had captured it off
Cyrene, and had shackled him as a galley slave; in the Balearics he
had escaped by night with a Christian fisherman for guide. They had
made Narbonne, and so this man had come, darkened by the Eastern sun
and lean and broken from the wars, home at last to his farm. There
he found all those who had mourned him for dead, and his old father
living still by the turf fire, but too forgetful of the world to
welcome him. And as he told the old man of the wars, that old man
only felt dimly in his fading mind (which was not wholly forgetful of
Aragon and of Leon and the Cid Campeador) that all the world was full
of fighting against Mahound.
Already five years past Huesca had been forced by Christian arms, and
already three years past the Cid was dead.
THE LOSS OF AQUITAINE
(_March 21, 1152_)
Easter came early in the year 1152, and that Lent was cold.
In the week before Palm Sunday, the middle week of March, the sodden
roads of the great plains to the north and to the east of Orleans
had trains upon them of men and wagons making all for Beaugency, two
days below Orleans down the river--Beaugency, the little town at the
opening of its shallow valley, standing upon the north bank of the
Loire and facing the poor sun of this winter end.
There stood in the town of Beaugency, near the stream, a strong and
simple castle, flanked with huge round towers. Many men have passed
into possession of it, have rebuilt, and changed, and blazoned, and
pulled down its stones in seven hundred years, but some of those
towers still stand. It was, in this year 1152, Church land. It held
of Amiens; and hither the Archbishop of Sens had summoned the Court
and the king, Louis, and his queen, Eleanor, many lawyers and many
barons, and the great prelates like himself--of Rheims, of Rouen,
of Bordeaux. Their tenants for assessors, their squires and hosts
of serving men and troops of horse and mules came crowding into the
little place, turning for a moment this half-forgotten town into a
capital; and the innkeepers were still dreaming of gold, and every
house was making itself a sort of crowded hostelry; every barn was a
stable.
The matter upon which this writ of the archbishop’s had gone out
to his king and the Court, to the Queen Eleanor, and all their
train, and to his fellow bishops, and to the barons of France and
of Aquitaine, was the great divorce. For now that Louis, the king,
had come back shamefully defeated from the Crusade (tortured by
rumours that were more than rumours of the queen’s contempt and
unfaithfulness, heavily warned that no son had been born of her
to continue the Capetian line), he was for ridding himself of his
burden. And this, although that burden meant the mastery of half
the south, and rule direct from Paris over whatever lay between
the Pyrenees and the garden of the Loire; between the mountains of
Auvergne and the sea. For Eleanor had Aquitaine for her dower.
The king was a man of thirty. He was the heir to that constant effort
of the monarchy to turn province by province from a proud fief into
an immediate possession of the Crown. No wider sweep of that net had
been thrown than when, in his boyhood, there had been brought to
Rheims, as a wife for him, the girl who was heiress of all Aquitaine.
He could also remember how, so many years before, that marriage had
filled all his thoughts and all his heart in the new discovery of the
south coming upon his cloistered mind. But life had turned sour.
* * * * *
The chapel of the castle, round-arched and broad, with very deep
windows in its thick walls, and a faded fresco on its roof, was
barely lit by the early light of the March morning. All were
assembled for the great decision. Mass had been said. The ornaments
of the place were veiled gloomily, as is the Lenten custom. The
king’s throne was set facing the bench where the bishops and their
assessors sat; but the queen, with her women and her advocates, the
tonsured clerks in her cause, and her barons of Aquitaine, sat apart
on the Gospel side of the nave, she also crowned and robed, she also
expecting the release. Her tall figure, strong and too large in its
rich draperies, suited her heavy, long face, over massive in the
jaw, too steady and uncaring in the level of its high brow. Her
kerchief fitted close, under the golden circle, to her now scanty
hair.
The issue of this suit, which was predetermined, she strongly
desired. She had said in her latest and angriest revolts: “I have
married a monk and not a man!” And this, her thirtieth year, was
for her also a culmination. She would bear the thing no more. For
seven years she had had no child; when the children came they were
daughters. She was not the mother of an heir. And the priests, by
whom Louis VII. was himself so closely bound, offended her. She had
hardly hidden her chance desires in the East, on the Crusade--a
Greek, a noble, a Saracen slave. She had not hidden at all her
contempt and her weariness. But there was more than that. She had now
another choice.
Ten years, twelve years younger than herself, there was a lad
into whose hands had tumbled, like ripe fruits from every side by
converging inheritance, all the west: Brittany and Normandy and the
Maine and Anjou from his father (for he was the Angevin), and from
his mother England itself--for his claim to which crown he would
fight and conquer, she knew. This lad, red-headed, passionately
willed, and to be the master of such great domains, she had fixed
down in her mind for a quarry. He would not fail her--for she would
bring him Aquitaine. He should be lord over all the western seas from
the hills of Cumberland right away to the Biscayans and Navarre. He
was that young Henry of Anjou and Normandy, of Maine: and of England
to be: a glorious young Lord, just past his nineteenth year. All
these things the Queen Eleanor held in her heart that morning, masked
behind her heavy, impassive face.
The loud, confused cries of hundreds talking in groups, of the
lawyer-priests spreading their crackling parchments, and of serving
men passing in and out of the doors, ceased to a sharp order from
the archbishop’s serjeant and the ringing of his pike upon the
stone floor of that church. There were only a few hurried whispers
passing between the clerks of the queen, and these also fell when the
archbishop rose and gravely put his question, whether any one present
desired to come forward on the plea of the king and of the queen that
their marriage, being contracted within the decrees forbidden to
Christian men and women, should be made null and of no effect. But if
such consanguinity were not established, then let them preserve the
sacrament of their marriage in God’s name.
When he had sat him down again, those who stood ready behind the
king--his relatives, and witnesses of his rolls and archives--came
forward one after the other, and each stretched forward his right
hand open, palm downwards, over the relics, taking the oath assigned.
Such and such was the degree of consanguinity between Eleanor of
Aquitaine and Louis VII, of that name, King of the French and Duke
of Aquitaine. Eleanor, upon her throne apart, heard in those proud
royal formulæ titles hardly greater than her own. She had behind her
generation after generation of the great dukes, her fathers, of whom
she came, the sole heiress, summing up in her presence the story of
the Roman south, and Poitiers on its hill, and Bordeaux and Bayonne,
and the vineyards of Angoulême. She would take good care into whose
hands all those hundred miles of countryside should go. She foresaw
the wars.
When the long and formal business of that Court was over (the
depositions inscribed, signed and sealed, the pleas of either party
heard, the documents declared, the relationship established), the
bishops consulted for their verdict, and gave it in corporate
form, so that the great clerics outside their body--the Pope, their
chief, and even great St. Bernard himself (the spiritual master in
Christendom)--said nothing more. They gave their verdict upon the
undoubted text of the Canon Law. They declared this marriage of
fifteen years now null. And their solemn sentence was delivered,
the silence broke again for a moment, and once again the serjeant
of the archbishop, with the pound of his pike upon the stone floor,
commanded silence. The queen took from her head the gold circle of
the woman’s crown and set it down in symbol of the change. She had
another crown before her eyes, and one that should be greater in
Europe for fifty brilliant years than the crown of the Capetian. She
was to be mistress of the Angevin, and to command in her own fashion,
through so many wars, so great a government.
She was free now. She rose, not waiting to see whether the king
should rise first from his throne apart. She withdrew with all her
train, standing high at the head of those high lords, and moving
towards the eastern doors. She went southward, and away to her own
land.
These things were done before Easter, the cold and leafless Easter
of that year. The spring broke, and by Pentecost this woman had
married the Angevin: young Henry of Anjou, of Maine, of Normandy, of
England to be. And his honour also she broke at last.
THE PILGRIMAGE
(_August 23–25, 1179_)
Louis, King of France, the seventh of that name, had no son. Two
wives had borne him four daughters. Their alliance confirmed his
house, but the Capetian foundation was imperiled. It had established
itself by an unshaken chain of circumstance and will, son succeeding
father, and crowned in youth before the father’s eyes. It had been a
process of power hidden in the mind, a thing gradually more and more
conscious for two hundred years, since first Robert the Strong had
come, no one knew whence, into the Court, and obtained his government
in the west; since Hugh had been crowned. It was now grown to full
stature, and knew itself: a thing formed--the kingship of France;
and from that seed, now a tree, was to grow the full kingdom and the
re-establishment of the Gauls. But now the advance was halted, for
Louis, already in middle age, had no son. Four years had passed since
his last marriage.
He was a pious man, full of doubt and intuition. He prayed secretly
to God, and there is record of his prayer, “I beseech Thee, O
God....” For the great times that were to come depended upon its
answer. He prayed secretly to God for a son.
When the time of the queen’s delivery drew near, the king summoned
Hugh, the bishop, and said to him, “Tell no one till I am dead, but I
have dreamed a dream which some survivor should know. I have dreamed
that what shall soon be born stood holding a golden cup full of
blood, and that the nobles of France came around and drank of it in
turn.”
In the night of the 21st of August, the vigil of the Octave of the
Assumption in the year 1165 from the Incarnation of the Lord, the
child was born in a castle to the south. It was a boy, and they
gave him the name of Philip, but for the populace a second name,
“Adeodatus,” the gift of God--so necessary was he to the Crown, and
so strangely had he come in answer to a prayer. Later he was to be
the Augustus, to fight great and glorious battles all his life, to
break the Angevin and the German, and to rule all up to the coasts of
the sea.
Then for years the king watched over the child, and cherished him as
he grew: not so strong in body as he should have been. All turned
upon his life.
When the lad was already in his fourteenth year, the king summoned
a great council in the spring time and said to the great lords and
bishops there assembled, “I will, if it is your will, that my son
be crowned at Rheims, and allegiance sworn to him by all while yet
his father lives, as is the custom of our House, and this on the
Assumption of this very year.” This was the year 1179. For he felt
his age coming upon him, though he was but in his sixtieth year.
Already had he feared paralysis, and known the symptoms of its
coming. His council acclaimed him and his will.
As the Feast of the Assumption drew near, which is also the memory
of Roncesvalles, the 15th of August, Louis, the king, came with all
his Court to the castle of Compiègne, on the edge of the great woods,
there to stay till they should set out on the two days’ march to
Rheims, and the young prince, Philip, was with him.
But just in the days before this journey was due, the prince went out
one morning with his men to hunt the boar in the forest at the gates
of the castle. They gave him a swift horse, perhaps too mettlesome,
and he rode out with his men in the morning, with their hounds and
their horns, till, in the depths of this high wood, they unleashed,
and next found a great boar; and him they pursued, scattering round,
by this narrow path and that, through the thick undergrowth, and
making round by the right and the left to come up with the hounds
at last when they should pull the great boar down. But as his horse
went furiously, and got off too far from the rest, the prince heard
the horns more faintly, and, when he tried to rally to them, took
false turnings, till at last he heard them no more. Then he knew that
he was lost. He had not eaten, and the day was done, and he became
afraid. Before it was dark he checked his tired mount and stood in
doubt, looking all around and seeing nothing in the woods nor hearing
any sound of men. Then he prayed to Our Lady and his Lord St. Denis,
who is the strong protector of the Kings of France, that he might be
saved out of the high wood; and looking round again to his right,
he saw in the gloaming a charcoal burner, rough and forbidding, all
grimy with his trade, and bearing on his shoulder an axe.
The child was frightened at that figure; but he took it for a sign,
and summoning his courage he walked his horse up to the charcoal
burner and accosted him very courteously, and told him that he was
the Son of France lost in the high wood, and in peril, and weak with
long fasting. This story the man believed, and he led the prince by
ways he knew all through the miles of forest in the darkness, till,
by morning, they had come to the castle of Compiègne, and the prince
was delivered safe to his father. But the strain had thrown the boy
into a fever, and it seemed he would die. Thus for the second time
was the line of France in peril, and King Louis near despair.
In such an agony he bethought him of the saints, and what help he
could implore. There was one with whose name all Christendom was
alive--St. Thomas, murdered at Canterbury not ten years before by the
agents of the Angevin, his rival. The archbishop had been his guest,
he had succoured him--through policy and as a lever against the house
which was his greatest feudatory, and almost his master; the house of
Anjou, against which he had warred in vain. There, in England, its
head, Henry, was a great king, his equal. Louis, the king, determined
to pray at that shrine. They could not dissuade him. They told him
it was perilous to put himself unarmed into his enemy’s hand; they
warned him of his failing powers, but his intention stood; and
immediately after the Assumption he set out for the sea. His weakness
hampered him. He was six days on his journey to the coast. He reached
it at Wissant, on the Straits, in the evening of his son’s fourteenth
birthday, the 21st of August. On the morrow, the Octave of the Feast,
he crossed the Narrows and came into Dover Harbour, an inlet of
the hills, and so went ashore, the first King of France to land in
this island. Henry, the king, came down to meet him, and they went
together up to Canterbury to pray at the shrine. There, in the crypt,
at the tomb under the high altar, King Louis prayed for his son’s
recovery and for the strength of the Capetian line.
King Louis had upon his finger a certain stone, the most precious
and (some said) the greatest in the world; it was called the Royal
Jewel, and men knew of it everywhere. All manner of stories were told
of it: how it shone in the dark with a smouldering light, how it was
worth the ransom of a kingdom, how the saint had claimed it in a
vision. But these stories were only tales. The great stone was its
own title. This stone King Louis took off as he knelt at the shrine,
and offered it to be the saint’s for ever. There they hung it, and
later they put a silver angel before it, pointing to it. There the
stone shone before the shrine three hundred years and more, displayed
whenever the rich cover of the shrine was lifted for the pilgrims,
and giving birth to legend upon legend; until, when more than three
hundred years had passed, another King of England--another Henry, the
Tudor--destroyed that shrine. He, in his turn, took that famous stone
and had it set in a ring to wear on his enormous thumb; and after him
his daughter Mary had it set in a collar she wore; but what became of
it after that, or where it is now, I do not know.
So the king gave the stone, and prayed at the shrine of St. Thomas
for his son, who lay between life and death far off in France, the
last of such a line.
Louis, the king, also gave to the monastery of Canterbury sixteen
hundred gallons of wine a year for ever, to be taken from the product
of his own vineyards at Poissy; a poor, thin, northern wine, but he
could give no other, for as yet the southern vineyards were not in
any domain of the Crown. And having done these things, and given
great alms, his pilgrimage was ended, and on the third day, which
was the 25th of August, he set forth back again to the sea coast at
Dover, and on the morrow, the 26th, he crossed, reaching the French
land.
His task was done. In his journey south to his own the blow fell on
him. As he reached Paris all his right side was struck, and he was
paralysed. The boy, however, his son, was saved.
On the day of All Saints, Prince Philip was crowned at Rheims with
great splendour, in the midst of the twelve peers, and so was the
full purpose of his father accomplished. But that father, in his
illness, could not see the crowning, and in a little while he died,
as well and piously as he had lived.
THE TRIUMPH OF SALADIN
(_Battle of Hattin, Saturday, July 4, 1187_)
There is a plain full of grass and reedy at the edges. It is sunk
deep between high, bare limestone hills. It goes level with the
southern edges of that clear lake which is called the Sea of Galilee.
Through this grassy plain to-day the railway to Damascus runs, and
through that plain from the earliest of human years the ancient road
from Damascus has come falling down from the great dark shelves of
the Huran Mountains, standing in a wall thousands of feet high,
eastward above the hot gorge of Jordan; beyond there is the desert
land.
On the sward of this place lay encamped, with their tents, seven
thousand of the Saracen cavalry, a chosen body to whom the
Christians, still holding Palestine, would have given the name of
“knights” or “nobles.” Their leader (or rather their head, through
the favour of his father) was a boy, el-Afdal, some seventeen years
old, the son of Saladin.
For Saladin it was who thus lay in wait to destroy our Christian
hold upon the Holy Places of Our Lord.
It was the very end of April, when the spring of that land is turning
into summer, and already the corn on the fields of the swelling
heights to the west, the corn of the bare uplands of Galilee, was
ripening. The year was the year 583 of the Hegira, when Mahomet’s
mission began--the eleven hundred and eighty-seventh from the
Incarnation of our Lord, from which we Christians reckon.
The presence of this camp was singular.
There had never been--save in the crisis of the Crusades--a single
issue of Moslem against Christian, of the French tongue against
the Arabic, of Europe against Asia. Such issues only show clear in
moments of intensity. But the great French feudatories, who between
them held the Syrian coast and Palestine, those who had been Lords
of the Levant since the First Crusade, three generations before, a
small group, immensely rich, touched already (those who were not
recently immigrant) by the Orient, inextricably related by marriage
and re-marriage--these had between them feuds, alliances, dissolving
groups of affection or ambition which made compromise possible with
the enemy. So had their opponents over against them (the emirs of
great towns, the sheikhs of tribes, the occasional armed leaders of
new hordes) their own ambitions, local aims and reasons. These also
had their perpetual intrigue. These also had been touched by the
West as had the westerners by the East. In the cross-currents of all
that swirl, you would find at moments a group of Frenchmen and Arab
against a group of Arab and Frenchmen, Christian and Moslem against
Moslem and Christian; so it had also been for now four hundred years
on the Marches of Spain, two thousand miles away, on the other front
of the great fight. There also the Cid Campeador had parleyed with
the Moslem lords. The great current of our pouring out against Asia
had such eddies on its banks.
On this side Jordan, over against the Saracen camp of cavalry (with
its white tents marking the as yet unburnt sward), the land that
rose hundreds of feet up to the other limestone hills of the west,
the land of Galilee, had for master a man conspicuous among all the
Europeans of his time.
He was a Capetian, of the French blood royal through the women;
through his father he held directly from the first Crusading advance
and conquest nearly a century before. His title he held from
Tripoli, of which he was the Count. And this square of land between
the lake and the sea was his, through his marriage with a woman who
had brought it to him as her dower, and who reigned in what was also
his capital and chief castle of Tiberias: the old town of Herod,
between the inland water and the first spring of the hills. Now this
man, at that moment, chief Christian though he was, consented to
be, for policy, a man that still parleyed with Saladin, the new and
tremendous leader of all that intended the end of the Christian name.
Raymond of Tripoli had reckoned himself of right, by the statute
of his kinsman (the last adult King of Jerusalem), to be regent
of the whole realm. It was his, not only in his own eyes, but in
those of his peers, to administer from Jerusalem all the feudality
of the Levant. It had been denied him, and denied him abruptly and
recently, by a trick which had put a man incompetent for such office,
a chance husband of the dead king’s daughter, upon the throne. Guy
of Lusignan, an uncertain man of whom posterity has thought perhaps
less than it should, but whom certainly contemporary men despised;
florid, perhaps unsoldierly, certainly of a sort which cannot make
itself obeyed, he had come, through the intrigue of a court and the
will of a very young woman, to be crowned; after her child, the true
heir to the throne, had (perhaps mysteriously) died. The Master of
the Templars, a man French in speech but from Bideford in Devon, a
brave but hasty man, had helped in this, and the degraded Patriarch
of Jerusalem, half Oriental, sunk in a harem, had concurred--why we
do not know.
The Count of Tripoli, Raymond, in great anger had gone off northward
disappointed of the crown, and most of the barons were with him in
the quarrel.
The secession was, in a manner, self-defence. Count Raymond called it
to himself the restoration of order; legitimacy; the first step to
a strong state. But what he did was to make some understanding with
Saladin, which popular tradition and the poets (with their sense for
the heart of things) have handed all down the centuries for treason.
It was not as though Raymond had made up one of those ephemeral
compacts of local truce with the small and changing leaders of
the desert which men would soon forget. The compact--or whatever
it was--was with Saladin. The shadow of Saladin had increased
enormously, rapidly, like the shadow of a great tree at evening, and
in such few years that they seemed (to a man then full grown) like so
many days.
That son of Job, Saladin, the Kurd from the Tigris, had swallowed up
his masters, one after the other, by intrigue, by violence, by that
sort of fatality which drives the conquerors, and which has in it so
intimate a mixture of enthusiasm, hypocrisy, and terrene desire.
The whole business had not covered more than the life of that young
son, el-Afdal, seventeen years old, who lay there encamped beyond
Jordan. When Afdal was a new-born child, Saladin was still a servant.
To-day he was imperial. It was a space of time no longer than the
space between the last two wars of the English (that in South Africa
and the Great War). In that little time Saladin had come to be master
of the whole vast Syrian and Mesopotamian and Desert and Egyptian
spaces which encircled the Christian bastion of the Holy Land.
Saladin was as much a master at Cairo as at Damascus. He was obeyed
from the Gulf of Aleppo to the Persian hills; from the Armenian
boundaries to the Soudan. This immense power was in the hands of
a man whose varied purpose certainly included a fixed desire to
trample down the Christian name, not only to the sea, but (if
that were possible) beyond the sea. Our little European outpost
of The Sepulchre, stronger in blood and faith and tenacity by far
than anything around it, had always for a century been abominably
outnumbered. Now for the first time in a century it found those
numbers all organized under one man, and that man certainly a great
soldier, and everywhere also obeyed and everywhere victorious. He was
about them to the north, to the east, to the south. He was gathering
his armies. The hum of the swarm was heard all over the East.
His parleying with such a force and such a threat--no matter
with what excuse of statecraft--could not be forgiven Raymond of
Tripoli. He called his diplomacy many names to himself. He called
it this, that, and the other. He thought it necessary, perhaps, as
an expedient to the Christian society, which was so threatened. He
argued, perhaps, for delay. He certainly was moved--though he might
have denied it--by wounded pride. He none the less played a part, as
he thought, for Christendom. But he and it were to pay a terrible
price for so much intelligence and so little vision.
This white camp of Saracen cavalry, on the sward to the south of the
lake, was the match that lit the explosion.
We know what proceeded from it; what we cannot to-day explain is
the motive, either upon the one side or upon the other, which led
to the fantastic tourney: it was in part a jest or stage play, in
part a challenge. It is of a time other than ours--we can only half
understand. There are but a few words remaining to guide us.
At any rate there proceeded from el-Afdal and his seven thousand a
request (not a demand) that the Saracen horsemen should ride westward
into Galilee, through Galilee, and return. That they should pass one
day in so riding courteously round through the territory of Galilee.
Raymond of Tripoli returned them a sort of set licence, marked out
curiously like the rules of a game: “That they should not mount until
the sun had risen, and that they should promise to be back over
Jordan before it had set. That they should do no damage or injury;
that they should kill none, nor burn nor pillage.”
What caused the request? Why were these terms accepted and observed?
We cannot tell. The request was made, and in that form granted and
accepted. Whether it was an outward symbol of the truce with Saladin
through this favour to his son, or a permission to ride out and seek
forage, by agreement; for whatever reason, the request was made and
granted as I have said; and the 1st of May, 1187, was fixed for so
singular an adventure. It was the Feast of St. Philip and St. James.
The Count Raymond sent round throughout his wife’s land of Galilee
that on this coming day of the Saracens’ Ride no man should appear in
the fields, lest by accident there should be provocation. He feared
lest, after that hushed, expectant, toppling mood, which the enormous
preparations of Saladin had now imposed upon all the East, there
should suddenly be heard the roar of an explosion. All his subjects
were to be within their farms, or behind the walls of their towns;
all cattle were to be driven within their byres and folds. The seven
thousand infidel lances were to ride round through an empty land, and
so return.
They set out northward after they had crossed Jordan, followed the
bank of the lake, challenged, as they passed, the gates of Tiberias;
but, true to their compact, they shot no arrow, they threw no
javelin. They rode on up to Nazareth, where it slopes to the south on
the Galilean hills--Nazareth the chief point of their hatred. They
passed under the walls of the little town with insults, but with no
act of arms. They rode yet farther, fatiguing their light mounts,
until they could look down the hills across the great plain of
Esdraelon to the height of Carmel, and even to a glimpse of the sea.
They had ridden more than twenty miles deep into Galilee before the
leaders turned rein to reach their camp again down in the deep trench
of Jordan, to cross the river and to find their tents.
It was already late in the afternoon, but the sun still high in the
sky (and their terms therefore strictly kept) when, as they halted
their tired beasts near the lake shore under the hills before the
crossing of the river, they saw a strange sight.
Less than one hundred mounted men, heavily armoured as was the
fashion of the Franks, sitting their larger horses, already deployed
as though for battle, came over the last crest and began slowly
moving down the slope above them.
They watched the sight curiously. If this unknown band intended
battle, it was challenging odds of nearly a hundred to one. But why
had they appeared?
The brilliant summer day had been marked throughout by the silence of
all that countryside; by the absence not only of soldiery, but even
of peasants and their kine. This little line of isolated knights,
with nothing in support and no one near, might have seemed a mirage
for its futility. But it was real enough against the falling hillside
under the westering sun. Since so small, novel, unexpected a force
seemed to propose a challenge before the Moslem cavalry could cross
the Jordan, that large Saracen force deployed in turn on its small
tired horses, and awaited the charge. They took their favourite
formation of a shallow crescent--the universal tactic of their time
against the weight of a European charge. They drew back the centre
from the main blow, and trusted by numbers to develop in the wings.
So stood the hundredfold cavalry of the Mahommedans, expecting the
shock and their own inevitable victory.
Why had this small Christian force so appeared?
This is what had happened.
The King of Jerusalem had sent two great messengers to Count Raymond
of Tripoli. He desired, if it might be, to compose his quarrel. He
felt the coming of the storm.
These two messengers were the heads of the great military
orders--the Master of the Knights Templar and the Master of the
Hospital.
They had come so far upon their journey northward as Nazareth, and
lay there upon the night before Afdal’s ride. There, at Nazareth,
they had received the message which Raymond had sent round the whole
countryside, warning them against provoking Afdal, when that son of
Saladin should come outside the walls. Of these two men, one merits a
particular attention: the Master of the Temple. I have just written
of him.
He was a knight, French in speech, Gerard by name, doubtless from
Bideford, in Devon. A man of energy and even of violence, of ambition
in government, of great courage, too personal in hatred, and alive
with the splendid traditions of his Order in arms. He it was who had
most supported the young queen in Jerusalem, most helped to make
her husband the king, most thwarted the high claims of the Count of
Tripoli. All this must be remembered to understand what follows.
This man, Gerard, then, the Master of the Templars, was there in
Nazareth that afternoon of the 30th of April, upon the eve of Afdal’s
ride. And when he heard Count Raymond’s order, he took it--quite
wrongly--for treason.
_This_ is the note of the tragedy that was to come two months later.
_This_ is the evil thread running through all the story of our
disaster in the East--the legend of Raymond’s treason had taken root.
Raymond of Tripoli had preferred the political way to the direct.
He had parleyed with Saladin. And on that account he, by far the
greatest soldier of them all, lost direction, and, in spite of his
genius, saw Jerusalem and all Palestine go down.
Later he died of the shame.
The two Masters, I say, he of the Temple and he of the Hospital, had
received Raymond’s order--to keep quiet within walls. This is the
way they treated it. They sent at once to such knights of their two
societies as were within riding distance of the town. They gathered
less than one hundred. They harangued them in the market-place of
Nazareth, saying it was foul shame to stand unmounted and with the
sword sheathed while the Saracens rode unchallenged through the open
country, with their high minaret cries of insult and defiance. The
little group of knights was moved; for the whole spirit of their
foundation was to risk odds and to sacrifice themselves perpetually.
They cared nothing for numbers. With their footmen to serve them,
perhaps four hundred (and these seem to have straggled and to have
been left behind), they rode out before evening from the northern
gate of Nazareth, and so eastwards, following the retirement of
Afdal. Hence it was that Saladin’s son had seen them, as I have
described, suddenly appearing upon the fall of the hill above them,
a handful of armed men upon their larger horses, confronting a force
more than a hundred times their own.
The Templars and the Hospitallers charged. They were surrounded;
nearly all fell; but in the course of the _mêlée_ the execution they
did was so great that the day remained legendary with the enemy. One
especially, James (who came from Maille, in Touraine, and who was
among the last survivors), they thought (did the Saracens) to be
St. George himself upon a white horse; for in both armies there was
this superstition or vision as old as the battle of Konieh, that St.
George was to be seen leading the Christian ranks. His enemies stood
round the dead man with lifted hands, the dread of unseen things
upon them. They wiped the sweat and blood and dust from his face,
and carried him off like a relic, still thinking him something from
beyond this world.
When the slaughter was done, and all save, perhaps, some five or six
of that little band had fallen (some cut their way out, we know, for
we find them in the later battle), Afdal stuck Christian heads on
his lances in triumph and rode on, and, with his reduced thousands,
crossed Jordan just before the setting of the sun; and such was the
end of that day’s foray.
When the news of it came to Tiberias to Count Raymond, he saw at once
the enormity of the moment. In numbers insignificant, their action
should be forgiven as heroic; but the separate policy, the contempt
for his orders, the provocation offered by these few knights, would
surely set in movement that great machine, the rumbling of whose
wheels all the East was expecting. It was a challenge to Saladin, the
very challenge which Saladin thirsted for: and Raymond sweated to
delay catastrophe. The challenge had been given prematurely in spite
of him, and to the ruin of his plans. It could not now be undone.
Raymond of Tripoli forgot, in the common cause, the past and its
angers. He hurried south to Jerusalem. He was reconciled to Guy of
Lusignan. All the Christian knights became one body. The bravest and
most spirited of them all, the high-born adventurer Reginald, who
held the strong outpost, Kerak, on the south of the Dead Sea; who
had, in raid after raid, harassed the rich caravans of the desert;
who, with an amazing energy, had approached, in the height of summer,
the Red Sea itself (sending his ships in sections over the desert on
camels), and menaced the holy places of the enemy hundreds of miles
away--Reginald, whom Saladin hated with a personal hatred for his
fearlessness and his unbroken power, at whose castle only that winter
he had impotently shaken his spear: Reginald of Chatillon came riding
in. The garrisons were withdrawn from the towers of the sea-coast and
from the towns--from Askalon, from Gaza, from Acre, from Tyre. Two
thousand knights and barons, fully armed, were gathered together, and
such a full levy meant, with all their sergeants and their footmen,
a force of fifty thousand. They were more; for the Eurasians, called
“Turcopoles,” went with them lightly mounted--of no great service
save, perhaps, to observe.
A meeting-place was discussed. It was chosen, I think, by the advice
of Raymond (for once accepted by his peers), at a point over against
the only road whereby the host of Saladin could come--that is, in the
very heart of Galilee.
For Saladin, based on Damascus, must strike just to the north or just
to the south of the Lake of Tiberias, and almost certainly by the
main road south of it--the road that has seen unnumbered armies pass
since the beginning of human life upon those hills.
In the choice of this gathering-place, right in the heart of Galilee,
you have one of those curious marriages between the symbolic and the
real of which history is full. The place chosen (because even in the
height of summer it had ample water) was that of the village, the
plain, the wells of Sepphoris: which they call to-day “Seffurieh.”
What an arena for the great issue between the rival forces of the
world! Not four miles south over the hill was Nazareth; not four
miles east was Cana of Galilee. A day’s march beyond Nazareth, over
the valley which Nazareth commands, was Nain. The tradition of the
Transfiguration looked at them from Mount Tabor, and the plains
below had seen Saul creep by night to find the dead at Endor, and
had watched the rush of Barak from the mountain slopes against the
heathen, and had heard the song of Deborah. Far below them, in the
flat, ran the Kishon. A day’s walk to the east was the town of the
Magdalen, and the shores of that little inland sea round which is set
half the story of the Gospels.
Here to the Wells of Sepphoris they came, then, from all the points
of the Holy Land, riding in; and that great fragment of the True
Cross, the standard of the Crusades, was sent to be the heart of the
host in this last trial.
So they gathered.
Meanwhile the mighty instrument which threatened them was gathering
too. Saladin, who had earlier been south in the desert, in the dark
hills beyond the Dead Sea, had come back north. He had summoned
all his troops from as far as the Tigris, and the Orontes, and the
borders of Egypt. Twelve thousand of the knights alone--that is, of
men who held rank by what the Christians would have called “noble
tenure”--were in his muster; with, perhaps, six or seven or ten
times as many--an unknown multitude--of lesser soldiers eager for
“Allah’s road”; the holy business of uprooting the Nazarenes: that
is, ourselves; Europe; Christendom.
Saladin also had his gathering-place--Ashtaroth, on the great
pilgrims’ road in the Hauran, two days’ march east of Jordan, four
days’ from Damascus. Thence going a few miles northward (much to
where the station of Tesil now stands on the Damascus railway) he
reviewed that vast host of varied men.
It was a Friday, the holy day of the Moslem week, on which day the
great fanatic loved to begin an enterprise--Friday, the 26th of June,
1187, the fourteenth day of the month of Rabi-el-Aker, in the five
hundred and eighty-third year of the Hegira. On that same day, at the
hour of public prayer, he began his march, and, going far, encamped
his army that night where his son’s cavalry had stood two months
before in the plain to the east of Jordan, just south of the Sea of
Galilee.
There for a space he halted. His scouts and spies went cautiously
westward over the burnt fields and stubble of the blazing summer for
news, and brought back the numbers and names of this gathering of the
Christian host at the Wells of Sepphoris.
Saladin took counsel with his captains, and it was determined to
provoke immediate action, for the superiority of the Moslems was very
great.
Upon Monday, the 29th, the host crossed Jordan and entered Galilee,
camping immediately upon the hither bank, and making no true march
that day. But upon the 30th they advanced westward some seven miles
on to the higher land, and stood at Kefr Sabt, astride the direct way
between Nazareth and Tiberias, ten miles or so to the east of the
Christian camp at Sepphoris.
The Christian host did not move.
Saladin, by one of those actions in which a soldier compels or
provokes something military through something political, detached
a force to ruin Tiberias. It was Raymond’s capital of Galilee, and
there in the stronghold were Raymond’s wife and her children. Hoping
that such a provocation would compel a decision, the Sultan, leaving
a considerable force at Kefr Sabt, moved the mass of his troops
somewhat northward to cover with their camp the main road between
Sepphoris and Tiberias; while the third body, dispatched against
Tiberias itself, did their work. This second camp of his in Galilee
lay on the broad plateau south of a little village called HATTIN.
This plateau was the watershed between the gullies (dry at such a
season) which run down to the Mediterranean and the streams and
fountains fully supplied which take their short course eastward by a
fall of many hundred feet into the trench of the Jordan valley and
the Sea of Galilee. From Tiberias itself, and the shores of the lake,
Saladin’s camp stood but half an hour’s ride away, and meanwhile the
force he had detached (and led) to reduce Tiberias was burning the
town.
Raymond’s own wife was close besieged upon the rocky acropolis of
it, threatened every moment with disaster. She sent, as Saladin had
hoped she would send, entreaties to the Christian host that they
would march east at once and succour her and her garrison. It was she
(the daughter of the Lord of St. Omer) who had brought Galilee to
Raymond for her dower. Her four children were with her, and death was
upon them all.
It was upon Thursday, the 2nd of July, that her passionate letter
came in to the Christian camp, at vespers, in the late afternoon of
the day. In the great red tent of Guy, the King of Jerusalem, the
council was held.
It seemed a clear task to march at once to the relief of the capital;
a first day’s march and a battle upon the second should decide the
issue--and surely time pressed most urgently.
Then it was that Raymond himself rose in the crowded assembly, under
the red light that glared through the hangings of the pavilion, and
made a speech which all but changed the story of the world.
Those who had heard of him only by name crowded around Raymond to see
so famous a figure. What did they see?
A little, very thin man, scanty of hair, and that hair very flat
upon his head. He was dark, abstemious, spare, with brilliant,
piercing eyes; older than the run of those knights; a light weight
on horseback; hardly (to look at) a strong swordsman, but with the
just reputation of soldiership beyond any other man there. His French
words rose.
The moment he began to speak it was seen that his advice would run
counter to the universal counsel of those lords.
“I shall surprise you,” he said. “I shall prefer the interests of the
State to my own. My own country is overrun. It is my people who are
suffering death and slavery; my town that is in flames; my wife who
is besieged and crying for succour. Everything draws me to relieve
Tiberias, except my business as a Christian, which is to serve the
common cause at the cost of my own disaster.”
He bade them not attack but stand fast where they were, supplied with
ample water. Between them and Saladin’s position, south of Hattin, in
this brazen height of the summer, not a drop would be found in the
baked gullies. The infidel army covered all the springs and the lake
behind them. It was but ten miles, but those ten miles would spell
disaster. Let Tiberias go. The Sultan would be compelled to attack
very soon. _His_ then would be the fatigue, _his_ the thirst. And his
retirement, should he be checked, would be through a hostile country.
We even find, in the record of what is told of his speech, some hint
of stratagem. It may be that Raymond, with his clear eye for war,
had ready some force for watching the passages of the Jordan, and
threatening to cut off Saladin’s retirement.
So he spoke, as the evening lengthened, after the time of vespers,
upon that Thursday, the 2nd of July. No one believed him. Though none
said it in his presence, he felt it in the air around him that he was
already, in their legend, the traitor. Whatever he advised, their
minds conceived as the trick of something too astute for a loyal
man-at-arms. And when his advice had been given there was a murmur
and a rumour all round.
But as discussion followed and broadened, the older or more poised
men weighed fully what the Count of Tripoli had said. For a time, as
night approached, their argument was gaining, and the council was
perhaps dispersing (or had dispersed) with the determination to stand
fast and await the attack of Saladin. But after darkness had fallen,
whether in full council or alone, that man who thought himself the
counterpoise to Raymond, and who thoroughly believed in Raymond’s
treason, Gerard of Bideford, came to King Guy and urged and urged the
folly of listening to any plan coming from a man who, to the public
shame, had once bargained with Saladin.
The king, Guy of Lusignan, changed again, and perhaps his council
with him. At any rate, he was obeyed, Raymond’s advice neglected; and
at dawn the great host began its fatal march and fighting of Friday,
the 3rd of July, 1187.
At the head of the column rode Raymond himself and his immediate
vassals, the men of Galilee, and those from Tyre and the north, as
though to prove at once his discipline in what he now thought a lost
cause and his readiness to take the sacrifice. After, with the main
body trailing along the road of that upland, through the parched
fields, came King Guy himself and the guard round the fragment of
the True Cross; while the Knights Templar under their passionate
Devonshire leader, in part the cause of so much evil, and their
brethren, the Hospitallers, covered the train and baggage at the rear.
The sun rose, the heat immediately struck, and with it struck also
here and there, harassing the flanks of the column, forbidding the
army elbow room, appearing and disappearing through the thick dust,
the hornets of Saladin. Those light horsemen darted, skirmishing
on their rapid desert mounts, armed with the long light lance, and
pricking, as it were, and goading the cumbersome body, whose surface
alone as yet they could irritate, and which yet they could so gravely
impede.
The sun still rose; the heat increased; men straggled; there were
too frequent delays and uncommanded halts; blocks in the column.
And all the while the Saracen swarm grew and grew on either side,
almost encircling. Still the long column struggled forward. Before
noon began the complaint for water. Of all the gullies crossed in the
first slow dusty seven miles or so, not one had so much as a stagnant
pool between its hot stones. Such gourds as men had with them were
long ago consumed, and of other provisions of water for such a host
there was none, and could be none in those days.
They had passed by Cana of Galilee, they had come to the bare upland
plateau, where the air danced in the heat over the glaring limestone,
and the broad rough track of the earthen road was a fog of scorching
dust. It was the early afternoon. The still increasing masses of
enemy horse striking and turning again, shepherding in their enemy,
almost surrounded the Christians. Already some grave disorder was
appearing in that three miles or more of exhausted men. In a halt
deliberately called Raymond once more gave his last advice--once more
to be wasted. He told King Guy that there could be nothing ahead
but disaster for a force which had fallen so suddenly into such a
condition--a condition inevitable in attempting such a march through
such a country at such a season, and with such forces against such
a foe. Moreover, they were threatened with envelopment. One way out
remained, and only one. It was to wheel round to the right--that is,
south-eastward; to cut their way through to water that night in the
valley of the Fejjas brook, and with the morning, refreshed, to hold
the passages of the Jordan. Then let Saladin, if he will, come down
south against them. Short of breaking their defence, his retreat
was cut off, and his great host was ruined. Again Guy of Lusignan
hesitated. Perhaps Raymond’s plan would have won; but in the midst of
this deliberation, the harassing Mahommedan cavalry took on another
aspect, more severe than the last. They came on in full force. They
rode round the host. They not only cut into the flanks but into the
Knights Templar with their baggage to the rear, and the end of that
day of torture and thirst was spent up to nightfall in a full battle
against a perfect circle of foes. Many of the stragglers had already
fallen out in each episode of confusion, and had passed to death or
slavery. The now depleted, fainting column camped that night; still
an organized body, but terribly shaken and already doomed. It was a
night of agony and of alarm. Long before morning that army of the
Cross and Europe was already defeated.
All through the short darkness men implored and fought for water, and
could not obtain it. Upon so much agony worse came. The Saracens set
fire to the dry bushes of that limestone upland, and under a light
wind the smoke drove through the Christian camp. Raymond, in the van,
knew that the dice had fallen. “He called upon God the Lord, and said
that the realm was ruined.” It was so.
The dawn of the Saturday broke. Raymond, with the van, took horse,
and saw before him, dark against the sunrise, the strange twin saddle
peaks which they call the Horns of Hattin, the watch towers of that
land. At their foot stood deployed the main body of Saladin; the rest
of his followers were on either side. The envelopment was complete.
There, behind the Saracens, was water, food. The enemy fought
refreshed against ghosts of men.
Their armament was stronger too. All the Saracen munitionment was
carefully distributed for a certain victory. The camels, with their
loads of arrows, were ranged behind the archers, and there was a
great reserve as well. It is true that, had the Christian army
been by some miracle in condition for strong action, the Sultan’s
position was very perilous. He was right on the lake, with very
steep falling land only a few hundred yards behind him, and his only
road of retreat passed just behind the fronts of the two armies. If
those fronts shifted in his disfavour, if his light men broke at the
shock of the heavier Franks, that road would be cut. Whether the
unfavourable position weighed with him or no, whether he had fully
gauged the breakdown of what was now before him, we cannot tell.
He seems, up to the very end of the fight, to have had some doubt,
tugging nervously at his beard and saying, “It was not yet over!”
The historian, with both conditions before him, and knowing what
exhaustion now weighed upon the Christians, can have none.
It was again, though on a much larger scale, in that same formation
of a shallow crescent, that the heart of the Moslem force--that in
front of the head of the Christian host under Raymond--was drawn
up. It did not at once attack, perhaps depending upon the sun and
the heat as allies; and when it did so, it opened with a violent
discharge of arrows. The effect of this was clinched by a general
advance of the whole Mahommedan line at the charge. It caught and
gripped the Christian body, separated its units, reduced the battle
to a great mêlée, in which numbers, a better order, and--far more
important than everything else--_condition_, were wholly upon
the side of the enemy. There is no plan possible of this surging
business, for no scheme was necessary or attempted. It was a cutting
off of large isolated bodies, a cutting down of smaller ones, and
a quantity of hand-to-hand fighting between men refreshed and men
maddened by thirst; and for the most part the Christian infantry that
followed the Christian knights was already in the mood for surrender,
or even for accepting death.
Raymond, Count of Tripoli, with his knights, charged at the king’s
command right forward into the press. He found against him the
Sultan’s nephew, who opened his ranks and closed them after the small
body of knights had crashed through. Raymond found himself with his
companions cut off far forward. He hacked his way out through the
mass of the Arab horses, and rode with his few companions straight
for Tyre. There fell upon him a stupor, and later a frenzy, to see
Christendom thus ruined. In a few weeks he was dead.
The footmen, the ill-trained levies from the towns, the half-armed
peasantry, had already suffered massacre or surrendered in great
groups of thousands. The struggle had not lasted the day long. It was
perhaps hardly noon when one small remnant of the Christian host,
crowding round the king, still held out. Of the fully armed men there
were but one hundred and fifty: with their followers a few score
more. The central point which they were guarding was the fragment of
the Holy Cross, and what they were defending was a little mound on
which there still stood the great red tent of the king. It fell, and
the last of the fight was over.
That evening, in the tent of Saladin (which he caused to be pitched
right in the heart of the battlefield), there took place an encounter
of the two spirits of Europe and of Asia--of Western chivalry and of
Oriental hate face to face.
This is what happened. The conqueror caused to be seated upon his
right the broken King of Jerusalem, half dead with the thirst and
the heat of that day. Saladin gave him the first water he had tasted
for many hours. There stood also before him Reginald of Chatillon,
whom he had so hated with the violence of a religious hate for his
audacity, his splendid courage, and, above all, for his threat to
the holy cities of Islam. This man was now in his power, and the
Sultan acted as Asia acts in such a pass. He abused him violently,
reminded him of the unforgivable crime--that he had dared approach
Mecca--dragged in the excuse of the raided caravans, and then fell
upon the unarmed man himself to murder him, but not before he had
heard the knight tell him that he would not save his life at the
cost of faith, and answering with the pride of a man completely
indifferent to death. This furious and horrible thing was not
sufficient. Reginald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak, was dragged out,
still alive, and hacked to death by the guards. Then the conqueror
gave orders that the most gallant and the strongest of his prisoners,
those most symbolic of the faith which he hated--I mean the Knights
of the Hospital and of the Temple--should be massacred. He knew that
they always refused ransom. There were two hundred of these men.
They were butchered before the victorious army in a public place.
This was the end of the fight which decided the vast affair between
our people and those of the East. Thenceforward, point by point,
we lost the mastery of the Mediterranean; we admitted the stranger
everywhere. We sowed that harvest of tragedy which is to-day the
Balkans, the Dardanelles, the isolation of the Slav. Spain only we
recovered. And as for the fragment of the Cross, they carried it away
to Damascus. Jerusalem was theirs that autumn. Whose is it to-day?
CHÂTEAU GAILLARD
(_March 6, 1204_)
Philip Augustus, the King of France, sat upon a stone; it was a rough
block of stone that lay, not yet used by the builders, on the rampart
of his lines before Château Gaillard.
The huge building lay before him like a town--but such a town
as no sight we see to-day can recall. Mass upon mass of sheer
masonry--worked limestone--carefully jointed, and towering wall
within and above wall, angle conflicting with angle in a hundred
ways, and the whole an effort of shoulders and of rock. These things
were (their ruins are) a sort of sacrament in human strength. What
man can do to defend himself against man was there visible and
tangible and amenable to common standards: apparent to a child as
much as to a mathematician. And it was not only a sacrament of
strength and of defence appalling in its dumb solidity and hugeness,
but also a sacrament of labour, of energy manifest and achieved. It
was also new and white.
Philip Augustus, the king, was an engineer. Every trace of the ditch,
of the three circumvallations, of bastion and of angle, meant for
him just what it should mean. He understood the co-relation of every
part in that vast whole. It was for him what a score of music is to
those rare men who can read and take pleasure in music from its mere
printed signs though no instrument is sounding. And as he meditated
the attack he admired. His creative soul was full of that creation
which another such soul had ordered--Richard, the Angevin, the Lion
Heart, now dead.
The King of France, thus sitting alone (for he would not be
accompanied in such a meditation), watched the big thing with his
chin upon his hand. He was a man in his fortieth year; his broad,
square, somewhat flat face already definitely marked with the fixed
passions of the mind and the habits of his long effort of recovery
and of triumph. His eyes were a little cautious for those of a
soldier, but very steady, and had in them that sort of secret smile
which goes with the certitude of delayed achievement. His thin nose,
and the slight sneer about his pressed lips, betrayed the same
emotion as he pondered. His great head, rather bald for his age, was
bare, and did not move in his contemplation of the mighty problem
before him.
The foundations of the work were below him, as were its vast
surrounding ditch and its first low containing wall. But the turrets
and the battlements, with their wooden, jutting platforms, stood
immensely above him, and higher still that enormous central keep
which was the stake of the entire concern. It stood inhumanly large
up against the keen March air, and the wind blew upon it from down
the broad river valley and the distant sea. It had in it all the
magnificence of Normandy. Down below, hundreds of feet, where the
wide river ran, the Seine, he could see the burnt timber houses of
Lesser Andelys, surrounded by its wall which he had stormed months
before; the ruins also of the outworks upon the island by which he
had approached across the stream. He heard, but did not see, the
carts in perpetual rumble and the footmen tramping across his bridge
of boats below. He heard the hammering of wood and the sawing of
stone in his own lines, and in his mind he recalled, as he so sat,
the long business of the siege.
Here was the test! This place, once fallen, he had forced the
gate of Normandy, the last province which could defy his arms and
his sovereignty. For now three hundred years and more it had
been a kingdom almost apart from his own, though in feudal tenure
responsible to him and to his house. John the Angevin, last Duke of
Normandy, no longer the young man but still the great soldier, had
abandoned the Normans--now five months ago. He was back in England.
And here, before Philip, Roger of Lascy, with his superb little
garrison, was still holding out, and until the castle fell there
was no passing north into the Caux country or into the Calvados, no
seizing of rich Caen or of Rouen, the mistress of all that land.
Philip, the king, remembered the long adventure. The advance up the
wide valley of the Seine until, a march away, he first saw, whiter
than the white scars of chalk on which it stood, the splendid new
work of Richard gleaming far off like a challenge. He remembered the
storming of the outworks on the island, the laborious fighting into
Andelys, the rush of the refugees into the castle. He remembered the
abominable winter, and his alignment of the strict blockade: the
sentries calling to each other round the lines through the long,
frozen nights. He remembered, not with pleasure, that awful day in
which Roger of Lascy had turned out all the useless mouths, the
refugees from the town below--the old men, and the children, and the
women; their helpless panic, stumbling to and fro between the outer
wall and his own lines; their hideous famine, and the blood, and
at last his own clemency, and his permission that they should pass
through and be fed.
Now the first breath of spring had come, and still the strict
blockade was of no avail. Five months had gone, and nothing had been
done save to contain that little band within, which still mounted
guard surely in regular fashion, whose taunts could still be heard
in the rough jibes shouted by night against his sentinels, and whose
arrows, when they went down wind, sometimes just reached his lines,
and had cost him men here and there. As he sat there he determined,
for all great odds and risks, that an assault must be delivered
even against so tremendous a body of resistance. Much lay in that
decision; but Philip, the soldier, was a man who would arrive at a
plan with increasing swiftness of judgment, and, having arrived at
it, would as suddenly execute his desire.
There went through the lines the order for the attack, and the whole
aspect of the camps surrounding the castle, one great oval linked by
continuous works, was changed. The business was now no longer to
starve but to destroy--and the murder of Arthur of Brittany should be
avenged in violence.
* * * * *
First they made a great way, very broad and hardened everywhere with
stone, along which the engines and the wooden towers could be hauled.
Then, at night, they threw into the first outer main ditch earth
and faggots from the woods on the hill above and all the refuse of
the camp, and they began that week to struggle against the corner
bastion of the outer wall. It was undermined in its foundations--the
sappers’ work defended by vigorous fire from the causeway against
the battlements of the tower, and by the repeated shocks from the
catapults and the rams, until, in some few days, the hard chalk rock
having been tunnelled thoroughly, down came a whole segment of the
outer wall, and the first circuit was in the hands of the king. Next,
in the same fashion, was the second circuit attempted; and this, far
less extended, concentrating its men more thoroughly, resisted with
greater power. The engines did nothing against it. It seemed that the
assault must fail.
Now there was in King Philip’s army a soldier called Bogis, an
obscure man loving ruse, and he found that in certain wooden outworks
of the place there was an entry to be made by those who could
cunningly avoid the sentinels, and he, with a small band, went in
there. But just as they thought to hold this entry, the besieged
caught them, and, as being the quickest way to drive them out,
set fire to this little building. It was a ruinous plan. Both had
they--the besieged themselves--to retire from the fierceness of the
flame, and also they were, by the effect of the fire when it was over
and done, left with a gap in their defences, so that though the first
intruders had been beaten back, Philip’s men could pour through the
charred breach.
They were at the third wall, the high wall round the donjon keep,
and this was taken by mere strength and at vast loss and at storm.
But of Lascy’s very loyal band not two hundred remained, and all of
them defending the wall, so that when they were cut off by the many
thousands of Philip Augustus, the king, they could not post even
a rearguard to defend the rush into the keep itself, though that
was but a few yards behind; and so, upon the Saturday, the 6th of
March, 1204, those that had not fallen in the fight were taken each
separately between the wall and the tower. And the Saucy Castle,
Richard the Lion Heart’s eldest daughter, so young and so strong, had
fallen.
* * * * *
It was the greatest feat of arms, almost, of the Middle Ages. It
was to the French monarchy and the re-constitution of the land what
Wattignies, six hundred years later, was to be for the defence and
the survival of the Revolution. It was the opening of Normandy and
the advent of all the host into the rich province of the north; the
most stalwart, the most lengthily organized of all the feudal things
that had proposed to withstand the re-integration of France. Through
that breach in Château Gaillard’s wall, as through a break in a dike,
the flood of France poured through, armed, into the deep pasturage,
the loaded wealth, the granaries, and the orchards of Normandy. And
with Normandy so held under, that summer France was made again. And
Philip Augustus, the king, became something almost more than a king
as kings were accounted in that time. For he became a strict ruler
over not one fief or two of his own, but over fief after fief that
had formerly been bound only by plea and service, not in subjection,
to his fathers. And it almost seemed as though Rome were returning.
This conqueror so conquering had about him, as he entered the Norman
towns after his victory, a physical character of conquest, and there
was a monk away in Tours, a canon of St. Martin’s there, who saw him
and knew him, and tells us well enough what he was:--
“A man high coloured, of a nature driven to good cheer, and to women
and to wine, large to his friends, sparing to those who displeased
him, an engineer, in faith Catholic, cautious for the future,
stubborn in a resolution formed; he judged at once and directly.
Fortune loved him, though he was too careful of his life. He was
easily both roused and appeased. He loved to be served by the many
and to think himself a tamer of the proud. Of the Church he was a
good protector, and he nourished the poor.”
THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING
(1245–1250)
St. Louis, the king, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of
others. He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with
peers. Pomp wearied him, even where it was necessary for the dignity
of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave
no more to be said he was amused to hear. Also he himself observed
men with very great wisdom, often silently; and his eyes, which were
a little weary even in youth from too much questioning of himself and
of the world, and from too much business of fighting of every kind
within and without, were always luminous and often smiled. His body,
which was spare, exercised by continual chivalry and by the weight
of arms, but a little wasted by solicitude, by mortification, and by
occasional disease, suited his gesture and the holy irony with which
he salted life.
All those, or nearly all, who came about the king--men themselves,
for the most part, much grosser in temper or much less subtle in
observation--felt this play of his intelligence upon theirs, and
when he was dead remembered it most vividly. Nor were the words of
St. Louis and his manner things very conscious. They surrounded his
personality like an air, impossible to define, easy to taste. They
were a perfume. Some who thus received his influence wrote down a
little clumsily what they remembered, and the things they wrote down,
after so many catastrophes and such vast changes in Europe, stand
to-day quite neat and clear. So that when you read of St. Louis it is
like looking out of a little window, unglazed, in a tower, and seeing
through it, framed in the stones of the wall, a well-ordered, sunlit
landscape, particular, vivid, and defined; full of small brilliant
things, exact in outline.
One day in that good thirteenth century, when all was new, amid the
new white buildings, upon the new ordered roads, when even the grass
was new (for it was Pentecost), the king, Louis the Saint, was in
Corbeil with eighty of his knights and certain others of his train.
And when he had eaten the morning meal (which was at nine o’clock,
for that was their hour), he went down to the field below the chapel
to speak at the door with Count John of Brittany, and with him was
the Seneschal of Champagne and others, younger and older men. And
as the groups stood there at the door in the spring sunlight,
treading the spring grass, mown smooth, Robert of Cerbon (the same
that founded the great college of Sorbonne, so that his name stands
everywhere to-day for learning) took the young seneschal’s coat and
pulled him by it towards the king. And the seneschal said,--
“What would you with me, Master Robert?”
Robert said,--
“I wish to ask you this: If the king were to sit himself down in this
field, and you were to sit down without leave on the same bench, and
higher than he, would you not be to blame?”
“Yes,” said the seneschal, “I should.”
“Then,” said Robert, “you are to blame now. For even now you are far
more nobly clad than the king, for your coat is of many colours, and
embroidered nobly with green, and the king does not go so clothed.”
Louis, hearing this dispute, smiled at them but did not speak. And
the seneschal answered sharply,--
“Master Robert, saving your grace, I am not to blame at all, though
I do dress in ’broidery and in green. For this cloak was left to me
by my father and my mother, who were noble. But you are to blame. For
you are the son of a serf, and your mother was a serf as well, and
you have given up the clothes that were left you by your father and
your mother, and you are dressed in rich woollens much grander than
the king’s.”
And the seneschal, growing livelier still, took Robert of Cerbon’s
coat, and took the hem of the king’s coat, and held them up side by
side, and said triumphantly,--
“There! See if I do not speak the truth. Look how much grander is the
stuff you wear than the stuff that clothes the king.”
Then King Louis spoke, and first he put his hand upon the sward and
sat him down at the gate of the chapel, and said to his sons, who
were there, young men,--
“Come, sit down beside me on the grass that we may hear each other
the plainer.”
And they answered,--
“Sire, we would not dare.”
Then he said to the seneschal,--
“Seneschal, do you sit so.”
And so did the seneschal. He sat so close that their two cloaks
touched.
Then said St. Louis to his sons,--
“You have done very wrong in that you did not obey at once, you, my
sons.”
And then he said to the seneschal,--
“You did wrong to speak thus to Master Robert, and when I saw how
shamed you made him, I at once knew that it was my business to defend
him; and as to dress, this is my counsel: you all of you should dress
well and decently, in order that your women may love you more, and
that your household may respect you; for the wise man says that we
ought to dress ourselves and to arm ourselves in such a manner that
neither shall the good men of this world blame us for extravagance
nor the young blades for meanness.”
And upon another time, when they were sailing upon the sea, it being
night, the ship was struck violently and lay over, and the storm
rose so that it was thought she could not live. Then St. Louis,
understanding that death was at hand, went as he was, half-clad, to
where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and there expected death.
But when the storm as suddenly abated, and the morning was come, and
danger was passed, he asked by what name that wind was called which
had nearly wrecked the King of France and all his people. To which
the master mariner answered that this wind was no great wind, not one
of the major winds of the world, not one of the cardinal winds, but
a little side wind that hardly had a name, though some called it the
little Gerbin wind.
When St. Louis heard this, he said to one of those about him,--
“See how great is God, and how He shows us His power. Since one
of His little unimportant winds, which hardly has a name, all but
destroyed the King of France, his children, and his wife, and all his
household, in peril of the sea.”
St. Louis, the king, loved also to tell this tale:--
There was a master in divinity, one who had disputed for the Faith,
and he came to Bishop William of Paris in great distress, and said
that he was full of doubt, and that his heart would not bend to
believe in the Sacrament of the Altar, and that this mood, sent by
the Enemy, pressed him sore.
To whom Bishop William answered,--
“And does this please you?”
To which the argufier answered vehemently,--
“Not at all! I am tormented thereby!”
“Sir,” said the bishop again, “would you be pleased that these new
doubts should conquer?”
“I would rather,” said the poor man, “that my limbs should be torn
from my body.”
“Why, then,” said Bishop William, “I will give you a parable. You
know that the King of France wars now with the King of England, and
that on the front of this war stands the castle of Rochelle, which is
in the country of Poitiers. Now, if the king had given you Rochelle
to guard, upon the edges of the war where the fighting is, but to me
the hill of Laon, peaceably in the heart of his kingdom, which would
be honour most--to whom would he give the greater reward?”
“To the man,” said the doubter, “who held Rochelle.”
“Well, then,” said Bishop William, “let me tell you that my heart is
not even like the hill of Laon, but rather like the little hill of
Montlheri, near Paris, with its tower, for I have never doubted at
all. So where God gives me in reward one measure, he will give you
four.”
St. Louis said that one should never speak ill of any man, and those
who listened closely to his talk never remembered his speaking ill of
any man; on which account also he would never so much as mention the
name of the Devil.
Also one day, when he was in Cyprus, on Crusade, he said to a
companion that put water into his wine,--
“Why do you put water into your wine?”
Then that companion, who was a young man, answered,--
“For two reasons. First, because the physicians have warned me to do
so; and secondly, because I do not wish to get drunk.”
To which St. Louis answered,--
“You do well. For if you do not learn this custom in youth you will
not practise it in age, and if in age you drink your wine unmixed,
you will, without doubt, be drunk every evening of your life; which
is a horrible thing to see in a valiant man.”
And thinking of this, he said again,--
“Would you be honoured in this world, and then have Paradise?”
And the young man said “Yes.”
Then the king said,--
“This is the rule: Neither say nor do what you would fear that all
men should know.”
And another time the king said to this young man, when they were on
Crusade in the East,--
“Tell me which you would rather be--a leper, or in mortal sin.”
And the young man, who was afraid to lie to the king, answered,--
“I would much rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than
be a leper.”
And the king did not answer him; but the next day he said to the
young man,--
“Come here and sit at my feet.” Which the young man did, and then St.
Louis said, “You spoke yesterday like a wild man in a hurry, for all
ills of the body are cured in a little time, when a man dies; but
if your soul is tarnished, and you cannot be certain that God has
pardoned you, that evil will last for ever as long as God sits in
Paradise.”
And then he asked the young man suddenly whether he ever washed the
feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, and the young man answered,--
“Sire, far be it from me to wash the feet of poor men! No! Never will
I do this thing!”
And the king said to him,--
“You are wrong again--thinking yourself too grand to do what God did
for our enlightenment. Now I pray you, for the love of God and for
the love of me, get yourself into the habit of washing poor men’s
feet.”
For this king loved all kinds of men, whatsoever kind God had made
and Himself loved.
On which account also he would give castles to guard to men that had
no claim on him, if they had renown in good deeds. And he would have
at his table men of any birth for the same reason. And so seated
once at table he said to a companion,--
“Tell me the reasons that a ‘loyal gentleman’ is so good a thing to
be called.”
Then they all began disputing and defining, and at the end the king
said, giving no reasons and turning to Robert of Cerbon, the same
whom he had defended for dressing well,--
“Master Robert, this is what I think upon the matter: I desire to be
called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am
one. And if you would leave me that, you might take all the rest; for
that title is so great a thing, and so good a thing, that merely to
name it fills my mouth.”
THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS
(_August 25, 1270_)
There is a little hill, not steep at first sight and seemingly
very low, which rises bare enough to-day over the African Sea. The
Mediterranean breaks (when in that sheltered gulf it breaks at all)
in waves upon a straight and narrow beach at the foot of this hill.
Beyond, not farther inland but farther up the coast, another hill,
somewhat higher but still insignificant, is joined by a saddle to
this first; to the south the land sinks altogether and admits (by a
narrow passage) the sea into the broad and stagnant lagoon of Tunis.
A few isolated houses, with no pretense to comfort or to charm, a
sort of villas, are to be found upon the quarter of mile of flat by
the seashore, and one or two stand on the rise of the little height.
Between them, for here a hundred yards and here two hundred, and all
around them for half a mile and a mile again, is dry, burnt, dirty
land, brown in summer, and empty save for here and there some tufts
of coarse grass. Far off, in two great horns or arms leading to the
horizon, run the mountain promontories that enclose this bay like
a pocket--a side pocket of the sea. A tramway, come from Tunis and
spanning the lagoon upon the embankment, runs past the base of the
hill at the edge of the sea flat. There is a halt rather than a
station, a deserted wooden platform without rooms or master. On that
platform is the name of the place, “CARTHAGE”; and thus does a man
to-day know where it was that the mighty Carthaginian aristocracy
stood, where the ships rode innumerable, where Elissa died, and where
the Roman armies, masters at last as armies always are of merchants
and the sea, stormed yard by yard the rise to the Citadel.
It was upon this hill and near the summit of it, upon the eastern
side which overlooks the water below, at a spot just in front of the
place where the Saracens had built out of the blocks of Carthaginian
ruin a castle of their own, that the King of France lay dying.
He was in his splendid tent, the baking air within hardly relieved by
the lifting of its side and the spraying of water on the canvas. With
him were his sons, and round that poor camp-bed were the many men of
his house. It was the day after St. Bartholomew’s feast, an awful day
of heat in August, when the distant blue of the promontory hills
trembled in the air, and when the iron of men’s accoutrements, the
rings of the saddle and of the bridle, were burning to the hand, and
the baked earth of that low hill camp scorching to the feet.
St. Louis, who thus lay feeble in the last moments of his life, was
but fifty-five years of age, nor did even these years fit him well,
for his face had always something boyish in it and too tender for the
approach of age. But the coming of death was clearly imprinted upon
his pinched features, his lips without blood, and the droop of his
mouth after so many days of pain. Before his voice fell low, while
he yet had the power, he already had ordered a layer of ashes to be
spread--as custom was then with pious rich men, that they might pass
the more humbly. He said that Philip, his son, who was to reign after
him, should be sent to him. This soldier was also weak from illness,
but he came; and when that lord had come St. Louis said from his bed
many things to this his heir, which things he ordered to be put down
in writing as he spoke them, and to be kept as a testament for the
governing of the realm of France, of which, years before, he had said
to this same son as a child,--
“Rather would I that a Scot should come out of Scotland to govern
this land of France than that it should be governed other than in
Christian wise.”
Of these things which he gave for commandment to his son he said
(among other things),--
“Fair son, the first thing I teach you is that you order your life to
the love of God, for lacking this no man can be saved. If God sends
you adversity, receive it in patience; if He sends you prosperity,
give thanks humbly lest you become worse through pride. Confess
thee often, and choose a wise confessor, who can guide you in what
should be done, and what should be left undone; follow devoutly with
heart and with lips the service of the Church, but especially the
Mass, where Consecration is. Keep your heart soft and piteous to the
poor, the misshapen, and all men ill at ease, and comfort and aid
them within your power. Do not take all to which you have a right.
If you have torment in your heart, share it with your confessor or
some other man who is discreet. Thus will you bear it more easily.
Cherish what is yours and your goods. Allow none to blaspheme God to
your face. Be very stiff to insist on justice and on the fulfilment
of rights, veering neither left nor right as between your subjects,
and follow up the quarrel of the weak until full truth is declared.
If you hold anything that you think another’s, give it back at once,
and if you are in doubt put the matter into the judgment of a third.
Remember the chief townsfolk, for if you will rely on them, the
foreigner and the great man within will fear to attack you. Revere
your father and your mother in memory, and keep their commandments.
Give the benefices of the Church not only to wise men but to clean.
Do not fight against Christian men, at least without taking counsel,
and in your wars spare the Church and all those who have done you no
harm. Lastly, very dear son, have Masses sung for me for my soul,
and prayers said throughout your realm, and I pray you put apart for
this a fixed sum of all you receive. Dear and fair son, I give you
all benedictions, whatever a good father can give his child, and may
the Blessed Trinity and all the Saints guard and defend you from all
evils, and God give you grace to do His will always, and to have
Himself honoured by you so that you and I both, when we have done
this mortal life, may be together with Him and praise Him for ever.”
Then added King Louis, “Amen!”
But these are only certain few words out of all that St. Louis said,
for the whole that he said was longer by far, and when he had done,
it was the full heat of the day, and already he was failing.
The suffering he was in grew greatly. He called for the Sacraments.
He received them with a whole mind, as was clearly apparent from
this, that they could hear him murmuring the verses of the Psalms as
they anointed him; and his younger son, the Count of Alençon, heard
him as he whispered in death. He was calling in whispers upon the
Saints, and in particular on St. James, the guardian of pilgrims and
of men who take long voyages; also he called on St. Denis of France,
and on St. Geneviève, who is the Queen of Paris, as all must know.
But by this time, noon being long past, all strength was deserting
him. He could make some sign, so that they lifted him as he desired
down upon the bed of ash where he would pass; and lying there he
found the strength to cross one hand above the other on his breast,
and so lying backwards, and still looking up to Heaven, he gave up
his spirit to God who made us, in that same hour of None--that is
three o’clock in the afternoon, which is the hour in which God the
Son died upon the Cross for the salvation of the world.
Thus, upon the morrow of the Feast of St. Bartholomew the Apostle,
passed wholly out of this world the good King Louis, in the year of
the Incarnation of our Lord, the year of Grace 1270. And his bones
were put into a chase and buried at St. Denis in France, there in
the place where he had chosen his sepulchre. In which place he was
laid away in earth, there where God has worked many a miracle for him
through his deserts.
THE TEMPLARS
(_October 13, 1307_)
In that quarter of Paris which lay to the north, built on the old
marsh that had been so laboriously drained, and close to the wall
which Philip Augustus had thrown round the city a century before,
stood wide, with its open spaces and innumerable roofs, the enclosure
of the Templars. It was a polity within a polity. No thoroughfare ran
through those many acres, and gates admitted outsiders through the
walls just as gates similarly guarded admitted outsiders through the
walls into that larger unit of the city.
This fortification of stone all about, this high curtain flanked with
towers and containing within its defences a whole population, was
the very symbol of what the Temple had become. Wherever Christian
men (now that the Crusades had failed) still held their own against
the pressure of Baltic heathendom or of Islam insolent upon the east
and south, there the Temple, over wide estates or commanding great
castles armed, boasted its power.
Within the fields of Christendom, far within, wherever long immunity
from heathen or from Saracen pressure had half corrupted the
life of Christian men, the Temple boasted its wealth or exalted
its luxury. In London, in Ravenna, in Aragon--principally here
in Paris--everywhere it was the richest and the greatest thing.
Christendom counted perhaps one hundred thousand manors; nine
thousand were in the hands of the Temple. Saving perhaps the Papacy
itself, the enormous wealth of the Jewish financiers, and the Courts
of the Angevins and of the Capetians, there was no such strength of
gold anywhere in Europe. It was the rival of all of these, and I
think their superior.
And this vast Order, as it was thus so enormously strong through
gold, was strong also through two other things--ubiquity and noble
lineage; and through a third thing it was strong--secrecy. For those
younger sons of the great nobles, those many squires and those
knights returned from wars in Spain or in the Levant, who formed its
not very numerous but dominating body, were bound by so strict a
discipline and acted with such solidarity behind their fortress gates
in every capital and garrison, that it seemed as though Christendom
had now within it some alien body separate from itself, and already
half an enemy to the great traditions of the common people and of
the universal Church, and of those open public servants, the kings.
There was a grumbling and a hatred against Templars everywhere. It
had endured for fifty years. What was all this wealth and all this
secrecy? Of what sort was the evil that hid behind those walls? And
how could there be tolerated in Christendom, whose nature it is to
be both homogeneous and free, something so jealously separate and
possessed of such unaccredited dominion?
And more: were not these men, by the very tenure of their office, the
defenders of the Holy Sepulchre, and had not that charge of theirs
been lost? St. Peter men knew, and his successor, and the kings they
knew, and the great lords their barons; but what was this other thing
established in their midst, irresponsible and giving no man account
of their worship--whatever it was they worshipped? Some said it was
an idol. All feared it was Satan. The great Orders, the preachers
coming right out of the populace, mixing with them, and haranguing in
the market-places, were no such peril. The Jews, in the mass small
men and poor, some few composing that strong oligarchy of finance
which had long dominated Europe, were exposed to constraint; but even
those that hated them could jest with them. They were neighbours.
The pitiless executors of royal orders were still neighbours too.
Whatever had power for whatever reasons over the lives of common men
was at least known and openly judged--save only the Temple. All the
West in the great mass of its people was inflamed and alarmed, the
little children playing in the street put forth their fingers to
ward off bad influence whenever two Templars went by. Men loved to
repeat whatever tales were told against them; and the pride of their
demeanour, sprung from a general nobility of blood as much as from
the consciousness of unchallenged strength, exasperated the public
soul.
Of all such angers the Capetian monarchy was about to become the
spokesman. It was a rôle perilous in the extreme; for to strike
at such a thing a man must strike at once with a secrecy equal to
its own and with a power almost as universal. Time and again, for
a generation past, it had been said that the thing would be done.
Philip the Fair, King of France, discovered in his jealousy, and
perhaps in his indignation, the strength required for the blow.
* * * * *
That fortress, which stood, an isolated thing, challenging the
greater fortress which Paris was, had in its centre, overlooking the
many low gables of its outhouses and servants of those who lived
under its protection, of its guests, and of its treasure rooms,
one great square tower, capped with the high, pointed slate roof
which could be seen from miles around. The tower was as tall and as
menacing as the huge round tower of the Louvre itself; it lifted
above Paris as high as the old belfry of St. Germanus, or as the twin
praying towers of Notre-Dame.
Within that tower certain men, among the chiefs of the whole Order,
sat upon an autumn evening, feasting. It was a Friday in October,
and Friday is a day big with the superstitions or the disasters of
Christendom. It was in October, the 13th of the month, and thirteen
is a number which Christendom has consented to regard with some
similar dread.
But these men suffered no great fear, although so much had been
rumoured now year after year. The greater part of them had come to
Paris upon the invitation of the king but recently. That Burgundian
squire, who was the chief of them all, had only the day before
walked, by the king’s own order, in a funeral of the king’s own
Court, holding the pall and playing his great part. Certain of
these men, the lesser ones, spoke as they sat at meat in this high
tower, which in a fashion commanded the city, of the talk that was
everywhere about, and the dangers which all might feel to be in the
air they breathed. But their timorous suggestions were ridiculed both
by the gayer of their colleagues and by the grave reproof of the
superiors who sat there eating and drinking with them.
It was not yet quite dark, for this meal of the day was a meal begun
at five o’clock as we now reckon time.
“There is such power in the Temple,” said that Burgundian knight, the
old Grand Master, gravely, “that if there were but allied with them
those others of the Knights Hospitallers which are not of our body,
freely could they rule the whole world.”
Then another said, after a little pause,--
“Though the King of France himself should seek to do us some evil,
others as powerful as he would stand our sponsors. The King of Aragon
was with us when last the dogs growled and dared not bite.”
Then a third, who had a subtle face and spoke in a high voice, said,
not pleasantly,--
“Were my own father to seek admission to this Order of ours I would
warn him that there are things known to us which should bid him
pause, for there are secrets we hold” (and here he smiled at the
brethren) “which are known only to God and to the Devil--and to you:
three partners.”
As the last man said this, the youngest of the Templars there present
showed in his face at once so great a terror and so great a pain that
the speaker sneered. That young man was muttering to himself. The
Grand Master, speaking still gravely but somewhat sharply from his
old lips, asked him what words he was thus saying secretly.
“I was praying to the Mother of God,” said the young man, “and I was
thinking of the dead.”
From the streets below, as evening gathered, there came a sound
perhaps a little louder than the common sound of the tradesmen at
their booths and of the passing crowds, but not much louder. Over
the river, in the king’s garden under the new white walls and squat
turrets of the palace on the island, a strange gathering had met.
There assembled at the king’s express command members chosen from all
the guilds and trades of Paris. They sat in rank, some hundreds in
number, by parishes and by mysteries beneath certain wooden pulpits
that had been hastily set up; and, from these, monks of the preaching
Orders cried out in tones of violence and of condemnation, preparing
them for what was to come.
“A thing deplorable and horrible to the mind is among us, and a thing
terrible to the ears.... Natures that have exiled themselves beyond
the bounds of nature, treasonable to the dignity of man. Christ is
betrayed, and their initiation is the initiation of devils. They spit
upon the Cross.”
Also to these men admissions made by Templars who had betrayed their
Order were related, and truth and rumour, and blasphemy and justice,
were commingled in these high denunciations.
The congregation of these picked men chosen to spread the thing
immediately throughout Paris were ready to believe, and most of what
they believed was true.
But still in that high tower, as the darkness came, the chiefs of the
Templars were confident and immune. Nothing in Christendom was so
strong as they. The noise from the streets beyond their walls grew
less, then suddenly rose and was more ordered and, as it were, more
menacing. They could catch the regular footfall of men in rank and
the clank of metal. Some rose, and going to the deep western windows
of their high place, whence the sunset beyond Valerian and the hills
of St. Cloud still warmed all the sky, they saw torches lit in the
gloaming, and they heard a challenge at the gate. The gate opened,
and a troop poured in. It was the king’s men.
No resistance was held or opposed. That great door of the tower
itself, which was to stand as the tower stood for so many centuries
more (until it fell at the orders of Napoleon), was opened to the
order of the king. The men who opened it at first looked at one
another. None spoke save the Grand Master, who only said, “Woe to him
that betrays his brethren,” and who, as he said it, looked fixedly at
the youngest man. Then the worked hanging, which hung by rings before
the archway of their room, was drawn clattering aside. The archers
entered in a body, and these men were prisoners. Before it was night
Philip himself, the king, had taken possession of that tower. He had
filled it with his scribes. The treasury was forced. The rolls of
parchment were brought forth, the accounts were rendered, and the
vast fortunes of that place were beneath the grasp of the monarchy,
which would proceed to the full revelation of so many crimes and of
the humbling of so much pride, to the torture and to the death.
But later, months and months later, when the last of these men were
themselves brought out for public recantation before the cathedral,
the old Grand Master, that Burgundian knight, standing forward on
the high platform before the thousands of the people to declare the
guilt of the Templars to the astonishment of Europe, for all his
avowals acted a most memorable part. Loudly he denied whatever wrongs
he had himself admitted, whatever blasphemies, whatever obscenities,
whatever denials of the Christ. They burnt him with his companions
after that relapse (for so they called it); they burnt him on those
little islands which lay westward of the palace, and which are now
a green place beneath the Place Dauphine; and the awestruck crowd
that watched his death whispered among themselves that the man in his
agony had summoned to the tribunal of God within one year and a day
the Pope and the King. Before the term of that citation had expired
the Pope and the King were dead.
BLANCHETAQUE
(_August 24, 1346_)
[_I have corrected Froissart by the map and local knowledge.
Hence Boismont, not Oisemont, etc._]
Edward the Plantagenet sat in Boismont at his evening meal upon
Wednesday, August 23, 1346. He, and his nobles about him. He had
marched from Acheux that day, an easy journey. He had found at
Boismont, before sunset, the advance guard of his force; now, by
evening, it had all concentrated, and the division (as we should call
it to-day, for it was about that strength) lay, some in bivouac, some
billeted, some under canvas, grouped round the village. The moon was
at the full; through the late summer air, still warm, the flood of
her light was over those miles of stubble, the open high fields of
Picardy.
Edward the Plantagenet, in a chance room of the village, chosen in
its best house, still sat at a table well furnished and spoke to
those about him of the campaign.
There sat among these who were that night the guests of the king one
or two useful upland squires, a little doubtful of their French, a
little afraid, therefore, of speaking in such company; but Edward
could understand, and could even make himself understood in the local
idioms of north England which sounded so harsh in such a place; and,
intermingled with the play of French at that table--with the advice
and the jests and the courtesy of the greater men--he would demand
the opinion and listen carefully to the reply of those few whom he
had also bidden to meet him, and who, in their ignorance, hesitated
to use the tongue of their rank.
But there was little to learn, either from these few who were easier
in their half-Saxon dialects, or from the main group of guests with
whom, as with the king, French was the only talk. The position was
known, its character was simple, its issue was desperate.
Headquarters take tragedy in war with a strange ease, partly because
it is their duty to check emotion, partly because they have to
handle affairs as a problem in the void, and to forget the too human
reactions of peril; partly because they have grown too familiar
with an evil situation, if that situation has arisen gradually and
enforced itself; partly because instruction, and the habit of a
cultured class, has taught them how futile in such a pass is any
waste of energy upon grieving.
In the billets and posts around, the polyglot gossip at the camp
fires and hearths, where sergeants saw to the cooking of the common
meals, was less restrained; and in Welsh, and in the Saxon or nearly
English phrases, in the rare French, in the mingled speech of the men
from the sea coast, there was a note always of gloom and sometimes of
alarm. Though the solid organization of the sergeants saw to it that
the muttering should not spread too far, there could be no mistaking
the temper of the troops. They knew, by that curious unexplained
process through which the common soldier absorbs a position which he
could not understand from a map, that things were desperate.
But around the king’s table a much clearer appreciation of the
peril led to no corresponding words, nor would any stranger present
have imagined, from the tone of that room, how close and apparently
inevitable was disaster.
The little force had now been in retreat, and rapid retreat, from
the failure before Paris, through one feverish week, pounding up
northward for Calais; not with forced marches, indeed, but with full
days’ marches. Now, at the end of that effort, it found itself
headed off. The long, straight, marshy trench of the Somme lay
between them and their Channel transports home. They had attempted
its crossing a first, a second, a third time, and every attempt had
been thrust back. They had felt down river with increasing anxiety,
as the host upon the farther bank grew; and, while they had failed
to make the crossing good, and while, as they were thus impelled
northward, the breadth of the valley which defied them increased.
Here they were at last at Boismont, on the lower estuary, with a huge
sea tide swirling back and forth, at its height--a mile and a half of
deep tumbling water--twice the depth that would drown a man. At its
lowest it became a mass of marsh and mud, through which the hurrying
ebb ran tumbling to the sea in varied channels.
Boismont stood upon the eastern bank of that broad water flank,
grouped upon the dry steep above the edge of the marsh and the mud.
There were rumours of some available passage, but no one caught sight
of it, and even were it known, what chance had the army of forcing a
long and narrow and perilous traverse when they had been unable to
force the short bridges of the upper stream?
Yet that very difficulty was to prove their salvation. There was a
ford, as the king was to learn, but its farther end upon the eastern
bank was ill guarded with an insufficient force detached from the
French vanguard upon the farther shore. For it was imagined that the
crossing could hardly be attempted, or, if attempted, easily repelled.
Edward Plantagenet turned to one of the lesser commanders, who had
spoken of the rumour of a ford, and said,--
“What was the name of your prisoner?”
The soldier replied,--
“Gobain Agache. He is a farmer of Mons, through which we marched but
yesterday. We took him with us because he had been talking too much.”
“One might have thought that you could have found intelligence.”
“No, sir; they were all dumb. But we had heard that this man had
talked, so we took him with us.”
“What has he told you?”
“He has told us nothing.”
“What have you offered him?”
The commander mentioned a sum large in his eyes. Edward Plantagenet
laughed.
“We will give him the worth of his whole farm,” he said, “and his
freedom, and that of any twenty of his comrades. Are there so many
from his part?”
“No doubt, sir,” said the officer.
They sent for Gobain Agache, and they made him their offer pleasantly
enough. He stood before them stolid for a moment. They did not press
him.
As to which of these two kings should prove himself by ordeal of
battle to be the rightful king Gobain Agache cared nothing. The
jabbering of Welsh and of half English in the billets had sounded to
him very foreign indeed, but then many of the others there were also
of his own kind. He was disturbed in the matter of loyalty to his
lord, who, he was told, had followed the Valois king upon the farther
side of the river. He was disturbed about his farm, and what would
happen to it if the battle were decided one way or the other; and
here he was, with the value of his farm to his hand for the taking!
So he spoke.
“The ford is close by. Your men ought to have seen it. Any stranger
could see it. It is clearly marked at low tide from the hard to the
hard, a broad made way of marl and chalk and great stones going right
across the river.”
Edward looked at that one of his subordinates chiefly responsible,
who murmured at once,--
“Sir, we did not reach this bank until the tide was already flowing.”
“Did you see a hard going down into the water?” said the king sharply.
“I thought it was a village wharf.”
The king smiled, and turned again to Gobain Agache.
“How broad is it?”
“About twenty paces,” said the farmer.
“Who is the best fisherman here?” said the king abruptly.
Gobain hesitated.
“I do not know the place,” he said.
The king nodded his head slightly to a younger man who stood ready.
That younger man went out. Edward bade the farmer be seated on a form
near the wall, and spent the next few minutes talking of this and
that at random, until the young man who had gone out came back with
an old, wooden-faced fellow, who pulled his hair as he entered and
stood stooping somewhat and stroking his beard with his left hand.
Of him the king asked at what o’clock the tide was full. He said, but
in the speech of St. Valery,--
“At midnight, for it is the full moon.”
“That means that the last of the ebb,” said Edward, half to himself
and half to his companions, “will be a little after six in the
morning.”
The fisherman shook his head and grinned at hearing such strange
errors.
“After seven,” he said. “Seven hours ebb, five hours flow.”
An old man, half servant, half vassal, who looked after the king’s
land round the waters of Chichester harbour, and who could always be
straight with his master, looked him full in the face and said,--
“Never argue about the tide.”
And Edward answered,--
“All the better, so long as it is not too late.”
Then he turned to the old fisherman for a last question,--
“What depth is there at the very lowest of the passage on this ebb?”
“No more than knee-deep water,” said the old man, “for the springs
are making, and we shall have the lowest ebb in three more tides.”
All this the king fitted together in one. He saw his opportunity. The
ford close at hand, its hardness, the chance of the tide just at the
right moment; he saw how all depended upon the defence of the farther
shore. He saw that his chance of crossing and escaping to Calais had
come.
He told the young man to lead the fisherman out and to give him a
piece of gold, and to see that no one took it from him.
* * * * *
The king gave orders for a march in the first hours of the morning,
long before dawn, while still they had the full moonlight to guide
them. The sergeants were warned. The Court and the army took but
little sleep. The grooms had none.
The accustomed delays and rearrangements, without which no force
is gathered, kept them to within two hours of dawn. There was but
one road leading parallel to the shore along the higher dry land
southward; the very long column followed it under the moonlight.
They reached Saigneville, those few miles to the south, just as the
beginnings of daylight, mixing in with the last gold of the moon,
was restoring colour to the world. Yet an hour more was the division
occupied in marshalling under three columns to face the river. It was
broad daylight by the time everything was done, and the sun was very
near the edge of the uplands on the farther shore.
In front of the army ran rapidly the broad stream of the estuary,
racing at more than half ebb to the sea. Already the mud flats below
the village were widely exposed, and were similarly showing upon
the farther bank, and there, running out boldly to the water, which
still submerged it, was the causeway of the ford. Its prolongation,
now that they knew its character, could be caught by the eye nearly
a mile beyond, upon the farther flats. It was Blanchetaque, the
ford, broad and raised as Gobain had described it. Far away upon the
low bluff there could just be made out doubtfully the small--the
too small--force which the advance guard of the Valois had sent to
protect that scarcely threatened issue. It numbered not a sixth of
the Plantagenet’s columns.
Those three columns waited for the fall of the tide. Before them, in
a small, close group, some four hundred knights, fully armed, stood
for the order to mount. It came somewhat before seven in the morning.
The thing had to be calculated closely. Too early a start would find
unfordable water. Too late would mean the catching of the ends of the
column by the tide; for the rearguard of that army, as it crossed on
so narrow a front, was two miles from the head.
The signal sounded, and that trumpet was heard by Godemard de Fay,
the commander of the Valois on the farther bank. He saw Edward’s
knights mount, and the three columns, each four abreast, coming
across the covered causeway, formed. Against Edward’s mounted squires
he sent knights, equally mounted and armed, down into the water to
take the shock. These two small bodies of cavalry met, struggling and
thrusting and hacking at each other, with the salt ebb swirling round
the horses’ knees as the beasts slipped and struggled on the slime
of the causeway floor. But not the wrestling between those handfuls
of heavily accoutred nobles was to decide the passage. That was
determined by the long-bow.
Behind the French knights, on the hard above the falling water level,
a detachment of the Genoese with their cross-bows supported the horse
and sent their shafts into the mass of Edward’s knights, perhaps just
reaching the infantry behind. But that infantry was here in the van,
wholly made up of the archers, the superb arm of all that command,
and it was _they_ who forced the advance. For the Welsh long-bow,
with its greater precision, its sharper impact, its longer range,
and the discipline of the force that used it, firing with exactitude
and command, not only threw Godemard’s horse into a confusion,
stampeding from the causeway into the mud and breaking back towards
the shore, but threw into an equal confusion the Genoese archers and
the French infantry behind. Edward’s knights, acting as a sort of
spearhead, could go forward, but only through the perpetual support
of the long-bow men as they advanced steadily through the narrowing
water and up towards the shore.
There was a moment of hesitation and of last resistance, then that
break in the line which is the end. Edward could see from far off
the horse of his small group of knights vigorously mounting the
bluff, and the scattering of the small force that opposed them. The
bridgehead was held; the main army began to file across.
So close was the issue that it could hardly save its baggage. A
detachment of the King of France’s forces had already appeared upon
the sky-line above Saigneville before the wagons could follow the
last of the English infantry on to the ford. Much of Edward’s train
had to be abandoned. But that same accident which caused so severe a
loss in provision saved the army. The Plantagenet’s command, nearly
all its fighting men at least, had crossed the Somme, and the rising
tide had made pursuit impossible by the time the Valois’ men had
made secure of their booty and had reached the eastern bank. They
watched the growing flood of water between, as, far away upon the
farther bank, the triple column of the English king disappeared over
the western folds of the land.
This was the crossing of Blanchetaque, and this it was which founded,
two days later, the decision of Crécy.
Edward had said “God and our Lady and St. George will find me a
passage.”
VILLE GAGNÉE
(_Friday, April 13, 1436_)
In Paris never was such confusion of mind, such exhaustion of
argument! It had gone on for twenty years, for twenty-one years--and
you would have said that no man knew where he stood. For who was
king? And where stood Burgundy? And what had come to what had been
the Armagnacs? Never was such a generation of conflict since the city
had been founded!
There are two currents in such turmoils: the young men, and the
fathers. Now the young men, from those of thirty who could just
remember the news of Agincourt, and who, in their teens, had seen the
great massacres when the Burgundians had retaken the city from the
Armagnacs, had lived all their lives under a king--the grandson of a
king of France, the son of a daughter of France--but a king also of
England, and himself a child whom they hardly saw. Still, that was
their king. Their priests, their notables, their magistrates--all the
world about them, took such a king for granted, and Burgundy, that
great house which the populace of Paris had always loved to follow,
still swore by such a king. The old men would some of them remember
this child-king as a usurper, but some of them as a restoration of
good things; for was not this new Plantagenet kingship the work of
Burgundy and the end of the hateful Armagnac? Was it not a true
Parisian thing?
All the great story of Joan, those intense two years, had not passed
unheeded. The loud echoes of it had sounded through Paris on that
memorable day when the armoured girl had fallen wounded in the
fruitless assault upon the St. Honoré Gate. But not even that great
sweep of reconquest could wholly shake the city. All the country
round fell away from the Plantagenet to the Valois, but Paris was
still Plantagenet. For nearly half a lifetime one state of things had
endured, and after so many miseries it seemed well enough.
But latterly there had come a change. For the people, and especially
the young men, were telling each other that Burgundy was no longer
friends with their boyish, weak, and distant king; and at the same
time had come a petty but significant alteration in the air of the
city, something that the men of the time hardly noticed--something
of profound significance for posterity was at work. The forces
within the city were no longer of one kind. Even of the nobles, some
were wholly foreign. The English tongue had arisen, and Willoughby,
in command of the garrison, was of that tongue. The conqueror of
Agincourt had spoken, thought, and lived in French. It was as a man
indistinguishable from their own nobles that he had ridden all the
way down the narrow St. Martin’s street, kissing the relics at the
church doors when he made his entry into Paris, all those years
before. But even by his time the tide had turned in England. The
Black Death had done its work before he was born. Henry V. himself
could use the English tongue, and to all the lesser men about him it
was native. Many nobles even could then speak no other. Now, after
the working of a full seventeen years, the estrangement was more
pronounced still; and the populace of Paris knew not, when a patrol
passed by at night, whether its few men would chance to be men of
like speech with themselves or of alien tongue.
And there was yet another matter, perhaps decisive of the issue
that came--in part because a reliance upon Burgundy had made the
populace seem secure for the young Plantagenet king, in part because
the heavy drain of men in the losing campaign all around left few
to spare for Paris: _the garrison in arms under Willoughby was too
small_--hardly more than a battalion (as we say to-day) and a couple
of squadrons.
Already by the spring of the year the regency of England and of
France was troubled, and a month before Easter the citizens had been
summoned to take oath, individually, in support of that treaty of
Troyes by which the young king reigned. For his mother, a princess of
the blood royal of France, was dead. Very few refused to swear. All
the great notables swore. The Bishop and the Abbots and the Prior of
St. Martin, and the chiefs of all the Courts of Justice and of the
Exchequer, and all the Bar, and all the City Companies, and every
priest and monk. It seemed a unanimity; though some few had taken
advantage of the liberty to leave the town, if their allegiance was
to him, the Valois, who called himself King of France outside the
walls.
Beneath that official surface the quarrel between the government at
Westminster and Burgundy had changed the Parisian mind. Already,
secretly, letters were passing between a little group of the
livery-men of the city and Charles of Valois, the king who was
reconquering his kingdom. They treated for amnesty; they assured
Charles (with too much assurance) that he had the support of the
populace in the streets.
So passed Easter. Arthur of Brittany, Count of Richemont and
Constable of France, received those letters and made his plan.
No very great force accompanied him as he marched up northwards
towards Paris through the night, but from within the city there was
nothing strong enough to meet him. There is a curious air of ease,
simplicity, and silence about that last revolution which suddenly
slipped the great capital away from the hands of the Lancastrian
Plantagenets, kings of England.
They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable,
and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles
with Joan, and was now to see their last fruit fall ripe into his
hands.
It was the morning of Friday, the Friday after Easter, the 13th of
April, 1436, just at dawn. The two flanking towers of St. Michael’s
Gate, the southern gate of the city, stood clear in the new light,
just before the rising of the sun. The grey of their old stones,
and of their old slate, pointed, conical roofs (for the new wall
covered only the north of the city, and in the south the old wall
remained), was marked in every detail, and against the sky stood one
man mounting guard upon the parapet.
Henry of Villeblanche, a gentleman of Brittany, bore the white
lilies, the banner of the Valois, by the Constable’s side. Him did
Richemont send forward to challenge the guard, and to him that lonely
man upon the parapet gave the simple answer: “Not this gate, the
next.” Such was the mood of the garrison. The commanders rode round,
certain that none would challenge. They came to St. James’s Gate,
little more than a bowshot away to the east; the postern was opened
to him. He sent through a handful of his men; the men of the guard
looked on, neither aiding nor resisting. The newcomers broke the
links of the drawbridge chain and the heavy gangway came down with
a clang, bridging the ditch. Across it rode at once the Constable
and Dunois, then Philip of Ternaut, the fourth a plain knight, Simon
of Lallain, and behind them the little force of men-at-arms and
grooms, hardly two thousand all told, filed under the dark ogive
archway and on into the city street, which pointed with its old Roman
straightness right down the hill to the island. As they so rode
L’Isle-Adam, the Marshal, climbed up the winding stair behind the
guardroom to the top of the gate, carrying with him the flag of the
lilies, the flag of the Valois. He ran it up in the growing morning
light, and cried out, “_Ville gagnée!_” Never was there an odder
capture of any walled strong city, famous throughout the world.
That troop of horse went on down the hill and through the streets
in turn to the island, to the cathedral, to the town hall, to the
market. The townsmen were just astir; few took heed. The Constable,
he and his men, rode back to the cathedral again--Notre-Dame--and,
leaving the horses outside, four to a groom, they dismounted in
their full armour and heard the early morning Mass all together; and
the canons who had so recently sworn for the rival king received
them. But as the priests offered food, after the Mass, the Constable
answered, “I hold the custom of fasting on a Friday, and I shall
eat nothing.” As they came out from the great church the alarm was
already raised. The little garrison was afoot, and Willoughby, at the
head of it, raised the official part of the city. No one knew at that
hour what would follow. All was still in doubt.
It was the populace, not the two opposing troops, which took
the shock. It rose in a sudden tide, turned by we know not what
preparatory workings of the last few weeks, or perhaps by a gusty
mood. A group of unarmed men, running up to the northern gate, seized
the cannon there, four or five small pieces, turned them down the
street, and just as they did so saw Willoughby coming up with his
little column of horse and foot. A volley of round shot pulled up
Willoughby with some loss and turned him back.
The official world failed to raise a force. The leaders of the
merchants, the greater lawyers coming into the street and shouting
for King Henry, the bishops themselves, two of whom had begun to
harangue, all failed; and the mob, growing greater street by street,
shut off the issues with chains and ran back to attack Willoughby’s
men-at-arms with anything that came to hand. That soldier kept his
small troop well together, and through the increasing flood made
eastward down St. Anthony’s Street to the Bastille. He had hardly
twelve hundred men with him, counting both the French and the
English-speaking sort, all told. He shut himself up in the Bastille,
having saved his command. There he awaited terms.
The Constable at once organized the city: put garrisons to all the
gates, had convoys of wheat brought in, and a market opened at once;
put men of his own at the town hall and over the city companies,
strongly holding all that merchant class which was the foundation
of the Plantagenet power; he proclaimed the decree of his master,
the French king, Charles--a decree of general amnesty--and all the
Saturday organized the city and brought it to order. On Sunday, the
15th, he prepared to establish his lines round the Bastille with
troops whom he had sent for from the neighbouring garrisons outside
the town. Willoughby asked for terms, and generous terms were
granted. The council round the Constable demanded that the Bastille
be handed over to Ternaut; as for Willoughby himself and his men and
his civilian notables, they should be convoyed safely, not through
the now hostile streets, but round by the north, outside the new city
wall.
As they passed, the men from the wall insulted them, and particularly
that Bishop of Therouenne, who had been chancellor for the late
government, to whom they called out, “_Ah, the fox! The fox!_” But he
grumbled, not at the insult but at the loss of his jewels, and no man
heeded him. Just behind the Louvre, where the city wall ended at the
water, and where the footbridge runs to-day across the river, they
embarked that little force to go down the Seine to Rouen, honourably
enough. And so ended the rule of the Plantagenets in Paris.
LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD
(_January 5, 1477_)
In a small room, the large grey stones of whose walls were partly
hidden under tapestries, there sat at evening a man too wizened to
show his full age. He was in the fifties. He might have been fifteen
years younger or fifteen years older--he would have looked the same.
He was simply dressed--it was winter--in warm grey clothes, and
though a great fire of logs burnt in the huge open hearth of the
small room, he had a thick cloak over his shoulders. He was cold, and
thrust forward to the flames long, thin and somewhat grasping hands.
His keen, narrow eyes, closely set together and very bright, shone
in the firelight. On a large oak table to his left stood carefully
ranged a mass of papers, and one great parchment which he had been
consulting. But for the moment he read nothing. He muttered to
himself.
One soldier was in the room, standing silent by the curtain which
hid the door. Without could be heard from time to time the metallic
clinking of arms and the steps of men coming and returning. At long
intervals there came from distant roofs of the castle the cry of
the sentry. For the rest there was no sound in that room save the
crackling of the fire and the continued muttering of this man.
It was the king--Louis XI.
To his hand there upon the table, and docketed and filed minutely,
stood his immediate affairs; accurately, in shelves which lined the
larger rooms of the castle, and served by a great staff of clerks,
was further stored the whole business of the realm.
In his childhood that realm was ruined. As a little frail child of
five he had seen Joan passing through his father’s palace at Bourges.
In his boyhood had come the difficult reconquest; his manhood had
been filled with exiles, with quarrels against his father, the
reigning king, and with a long apprenticeship in intrigue.
It was his business to rebuild the realm. And for now nearly sixteen
years he had plunged into that business as private men of the same
sort will plunge into the accumulation of a fortune. It had absorbed
him altogether, and his soul, never sane, had suffered from that
absorption, much as suffer the souls of men who devote themselves in
the same fashion to gold.
But his zeal was for the re-establishment of the realm. This,
the unceasing pressure of a spirit which for centuries had urged
and spurred the Capetian line, which had made them--some quite
unconsciously, none quite consciously--the agents of a great purpose,
had urged Louis continually. His task was nearly done. Only one great
rival still loomed to the east of him. It was Burgundy.
All that Rhineland, all that great street from south to north, from
the Alps to the Low Countries, all that belt of true French soil, and
of its extension into the Germanies, was under a man--Charles the
Bold--ten years younger than himself, who, building on his father’s
power, had dared to conceive independence. He would make a new State,
breaking the vassalage with the King of France. He would leave France
halved.
This man, Charles, stood against that older man, Louis, in a contrast
more complete than any two rivals you can name: Louis frail, cunning,
tenacious, garrulous, delighting in a millioned web of detail,
patient, cruel, diseased: Charles, short but strong in the saddle,
square-shouldered, violent in action, somewhat silent, his mass of
thick black hair ponderous upon his enormous head, living in the
midst of charges, and thinking that the world could be carried at a
charge.
The last issue between these two men had come. The one was sitting
here in his narrow room, in the heart of France, holding the threads
which stretched to the ends of Europe. The other, in camp, pursued
the siege of Nancy, and was in the act of taking that capital,
destroying Lorraine: confirming his power.
* * * * *
As King Louis sat there, his hands and feet toward the flame,
muttering to himself, and his bright, narrow eyes seeing scheme after
scheme conjointly in the dancing of the fire, his mood suddenly
changed and, as though he were alone, careless of the attendant, he
suddenly threw himself upon his knees at the chair where he had been
sitting, and raised his mutterings somewhat into prayers. He groped
in his breast for an amulet and kissed it fervently, and continued
in a litany name after name of those who should protect him and his
race, and all his land. But the name which occurred most often in
that confused torrent of intense mumbling was the name of St. Martin
of Tours, his neighbour, his protector, he to whom Louis the King had
shown such generosity; he upon whom Louis the King had showered so
much wealth, and before whom he continued to bow.
* * * * *
In the first light of a very cold morning the king rode out with
half a dozen familiars. He was helped with difficulty not on to a
horse but on to a mule. His long, thin, somewhat deformed legs with
difficulty held the saddle, and he stooped forward gracelessly as
he rode. No one could have told him from a chance traveller of the
poorer sort. He was in grey, as always--a thick, coarse cloth--and on
his head a rough, pointed hat, with a leaden medal stuck in the band
of it, and on the medal, stamped, an image of Our Lady.
He rode out over the drawbridge toward Tours, in the bitterly cold
mist as the day broadened. One hundred yards and more behind came the
archers and the drivers of the wagons; for he had begun a journey.
The king and his little group of attendants halted for twenty minutes
in the town for Mass. As he came out of Mass, he turned to the first
poor inn of the market square, and ate the first short meal of the
day, while the innkeeper and the serving-maid watched him in terror,
and the passers-by in the streets huddled in corners, catching
glimpses of him through the thick, small panes of the window.
And all during that meal he talked, and talked incessantly, to his
companions, upon every point of his policy: upon the place they
should visit, upon the chances of meeting the messenger whom he
expected--upon all things.
They took the road again like a little company of poor pilgrims; they
followed up the Loire.
They came at last to a place where the road, damp with melting snow
but now lit by a pale morning sun, passed through a deep wood along
the river bank, and there stood a hut which the foresters used. It
was the appointed spot. The king halted, dismounted, and entered with
but one companion. The rest stood without.
They had not long to wait. Another small group approached from the
west, but these were splashed with mud, broken with fatigue, their
fine horses hardly carrying them, and stumbling as they went. One of
them was half in armour, and seemed to be their chief. He scrambled
down stiffly from his beast, almost falling as he did so, entered the
hut, and knelt before the king.
The king raised him, but before he could tell his great news Louis
deluged him with yet another river of talk. How were the ways? What
had he met? Had he passed through Bar, or had he come round north
through Argonne? Had he heard what the common people were saying in
either place?
Twice the newcomer attempted to tell his news, and twice he was
swamped again by that ceaseless flood of clipped, tumbling words. At
last he had his moment, and he took it to tell in three phrases the
enormous thing which he had carried in silence through that night and
through four desperate marches before.
Charles the Bold was dead. Nancy was relieved. Lorraine was master of
his own again. The imagined new State was in ruins. Louis took up the
ceaseless chatter again, patting the hand of his messenger as he did
so, and smiling a thin but contented smile.
His work was accomplished. His great scheme was fulfilled, and yet
such a moment led him to nothing more solemn than an endless cataract
of words--save for one moment, when he fell again upon his knees on
the earth floor of that hut and prayed as fervently as though he had
been alone. He rose again to question and requestion, and to make
his comments. He was exhausted before he was silent.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, far off in Lorraine, the battle had been brought to its
conclusion, and the great Duke was dead.
It was upon Sunday, the 5th of January 1477, that René of Lorraine,
coming out from his Mass in the Abbey Church of St. Nicholas, had
ordered his armies--some few of the lords of the Barrois, some few
more from the Charolais, some from the Jura were there; but the great
mass of his rank and file were a hubbub of German talk from the
Alsatian towns and from the Swiss mountains--ten thousand of them.
They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away,
and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender,
Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles.
It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the
Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward
up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great
masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon
that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before
them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles
away, the spires of Nancy.
From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe
upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding
the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow
began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a
mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along
the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the
Burgundians.
But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the
shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but
five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one.
They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly
to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their
position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge.
Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no
troops will stand--the sound of attack behind their line.
It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just
before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where
none thought soldiers to be--far off and behind them to their right,
from the woodside.
It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the
right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for
the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the
Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his
line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from
the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob,
and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter.
Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out
across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the
thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford.
Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them
of his nobility, but it could not stand--it was forced back in the
general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the
snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with
a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans
and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the
broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.
A mile from the city gate there ran a brook, the brook of St. John.
There, in the hurly-burly, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy,
parried right and left desperately, his lords about him, and in their
midst were the enemy, ahorse and afoot, the long halberds of the
Swiss, thrusting pikes, and the swing of swords.
None knew the great Duke Charles in such a confusion. They saw his
rich armour, but they had no other sign; for the golden lion of
Burgundy upon his helm had fallen even before the battle, and he
himself, as he saw the crest tumble on his saddle bow, all those
hours before, had muttered: “An omen--_signum dei_!”
So that man, unknown to the enemy, fought hard with his visor down. A
thrust took him in the left thigh, another in the back. As he reeled
he cried “Bourgoyne!” but one Claude, the Lord of Bauzemont, who was
fighting there for Lorraine, hearing that cry, thrust a lance at him,
not knowing whom he struck. The helm and its visor shattered. The
face of the great Duke was gashed from ear to chin, and he went down.
None knew who had so fallen, for all the nobles about him also were
destroyed. And that was the end of Charles the Bold.
* * * * *
The press of the conquerors rushed up to the city gate, the Gate of
St. Nicholas. The starving people ran to cheer, the garrison let down
the bridge beyond the town, the last remnants of Charles’s force were
massacred at the bridge of Bouxières.
The wintry sun was setting. The force had its hold again upon all the
fields. The Duke of Lorraine held festival that night--back in his
own city, and all his people eating again and drinking, and rejoicing
in victory.
But one thing checked his triumph: whither had Charles gone? Was he
in Metz, or fled perhaps into the Germanies, or got home among his
own people in the Low Countries?
All the next day, Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Kings, they searched
the battlefield, heaps of naked bodies stripped by the spoilers, but
none could say that they had found the great Duke. But that evening,
as Lorraine rode back into Nancy, despondent and fearful, a captain
brought to him a young page, one of the Colonnas of Rome, and said
to him: “This lad knew the great Duke.”
So next morning, the Tuesday, the 7th of January, very early, they
went out among the bodies in the snow, and the Italian boy would say
first of one, then of another: “It is not he ... it is not he.” And
with him also went one who had been a maid in the service of Charles.
Then, at last, they came to the strong body, lying all wounds, with
its dreadful gashed face, and the mass of thick, black hair against
the snow, and the Italian page cried, “That is the Duke,” and the
servant knelt down crying and sobbing, and they heard her say, “Ha!
Burgundy, my Lord! my Lord!”
René of Lorraine had that famous body lifted with reverence, and
wrapped in a linen shroud, and carried with pomp into Nancy.
* * * * *
Thenceforward, with whatever vicissitude of come and go, the Rhine
was recovered for the Gauls.
TWO SATURDAYS
(_Montmartre and Amboise_)
(_August 15, 1534; March 16, 1560_)
Two scenes, half a lifetime apart, small, detailed, vivid, mark the
enormous storm of the Reformation in the Gauls--that vast battle
which was never wholly won or lost, no, not to this day; for France
is the arena of Europe. Each of these little scenes was an origin:
the one of the force that half-reconquered Europe for the Church, the
Jesuits; the other of the force that, taking arms for Calvinism, all
but conquered the crown--the force of the great nobles in rebellion,
of the gentry, of the merchants in their towns, and of the peasants
in the central hills, the Huguenots.
* * * * *
In the morning of Saturday, August the 15th, in the year 1534, the
Feast of the Assumption, six men of various age came to the little
room on the hill of the university, where lived, determined, eager,
somewhat silent, a dark, square-headed Basque, whose military temper
was to half change the world. An intense devotion, a burning life
within, an absorption in divine things and in the fate of the soul,
made this man single from all of his fellows. None met him but went
away with an impression as of flame. It was Ignatius of Loyola in his
forty-fourth year.
The six who thus came together up the stone stairs to that little
room, with its crucifix, its narrow bed, its bare table, its empty
walls, were all men who had come under that profound influence;
men of the university, like himself--men already filled with the
conception of a mission. There, leading them, was yet another Basque,
called from his mother’s name Xavier, six years younger than the
chief. There was young Salman of Toledo, a boy of nineteen; there was
Laynez the Castilian, just of age; Alphonso of Valladolid; Rodriguez
of Portugal; and (the only Gaul among them) a peasant from the hills
of Savoy, long plunged into the study of the academies, not yet
thirty: Faber, from the hamlet, and the Alpine huts of Villaret. He
alone was a priest.
When they were thus assembled they set out about their purpose.
They went them down the university hill by that straight and narrow
Roman street which crosses Paris from south to north, and is here
the street of St. James, there of St. Martin. They traversed the
twin bridges of the island, they went the full mile to the city wall,
passed through St. Martin’s Gate, and, outside, were in the fields.
The hill of Montmartre stood before them, its gypsum quarries, its
crazy windmills, and on the summit a little old church--poor, for
it had few parishioners. It was called Our Lady of the Martyrs, and
thither were they bound upon this, Her feast day.
They climbed the hill. They went down by the little stair near the
porch, which leads into the crypt of that strange place, and where
the stones go back to the temple of the pagan days. Faber vested and
began the Mass.
When he came to the Communion, the six laymen rose and knelt at
the altar rails. Then, one by one in order each, before receiving
the Host, took in a loud voice the vow of their companionship, and
Faber himself, the last, pronounced those words. The Ablutions were
received. The post-Communions read, the last Gospel recited. The
Society of Jesus was founded.
* * * * *
The winter was not over in Blois--the winter of 1560. The old king,
who had so sternly maintained the national religion, was dead; a boy
of fifteen reigned--frail, incompetent, diseased--the son of that
Medicean woman whom an enemy has called “the worm from the tomb of
Italy.”
The child was married to a child-wife, the daughter of the King of
Scotland, Mary Stuart. It was she, in part, already masterful, that
had called to that Court her mother’s brothers, the sons of Lorraine,
the Guises; grandsons of that same man who had entered his capital of
Nancy on the death of Charles the Bold.
And they were hated. They were not of the national nobility; they had
enriched themselves scandalously. If they were to be the protectors
of the Church, it was but another weakness for the Church. One
of their group, a child of fourteen, had been made Archbishop of
Rheims, and loaded with the wealth of such great names as Cluny--St.
Bernard’s glorious house; as Marmoutier--St. Martin’s immemorial
foundation. Scandal! Scandal!
Against these men, against the new, feeble, immature king, rose
muttering throughout the commonwealth all forms of opposition,
linked under the bond (here loose, there strict) of the Reform,
of the Gospellers, of them that would be rid of their fathers,
and who were clamped to the iron of Calvin. He, far off in Geneva,
commanded. Already, some few months since, the Reformers had
organized everywhere. They had held their first synod, making them
one thing throughout the territory of France, and, by hundreds, the
armed gentry were rallying, though secretly, to that standard. Men
from all countries leaked in to take service in the coming war as
mercenaries. Many from the Germanies, many from Switzerland. They
were sworn in secrecy by the German freebooters’ oath: “To follow the
dumb captain.” And of the native people crowds were ready, when the
signal should be given, to join the nobles who were moving. By little
groups, and as single men, they came filtering through towards the
Loire.
What could the Guises bring against that? There were no armies in
those days, save such guards as the king could pay, or such gentry as
would still obey his summons.
The plot was laid to seize the crowned boy while the Court thus still
sat in Blois, for the town was open and without walls. A mob could
carry it. The leaders still professed that to this boy they wished
no harm. It was his counsellors they would be rid of, and all their
hatred was for the Guises--especially for the duke, their head, the
real ruler.
But before the appointed day the young king, restless, must be moving
down river. He would hunt, and he was tired of the woods to the west
and to the south. The Court set out. It was through this chance whim
that the rising was postponed and lost its vigour. It was through
this chance whim that the threatened Court found itself safe in the
little stronghold of Amboise.
As it there sat it felt in the air a menace all around. They had
summoned and held hostage in the castle one or two of the greatest
among those whom they knew to be their secret enemies. But the
populace also was astir. Not all looks were kind, and there were
strange men on market days.
Some order misunderstood, some rashness, provoked a misfire. A crowd
of men made for the castle, not all of them unarmed, professing that
they must see the king. They were rejected; contemptuously enough
young Francis II. even scattered coins among them, as being of the
poor and common people. That was only the grumbling of something
distant.
It was on Saturday, the 16th of March, that the storm broke; but
even then, ill-led. Men came swarming out from the woods on the south
of the town. It was an armed attack. It has been called “The Tumult
of Amboise.” The leaders were few, ill-chosen and worse followed. Not
enough of the gentry were there. Horsemen and armour were lacking.
It could but fail. The gates were shut in time, the ramparts armed,
the wave of attack broke against impregnable walls; it was shot down
under the trained aim of the archers; it was pursued, dispersed,
driven to its woods again, and, on the way, whole dozens were
rounded up and bound, and beaten, and thrust back into the castle as
prisoners. For days the hanging of them went on, from the gibbet of
the town itself, from the beams of the main gateway of the castle,
from the iron crooks on its walls.
The thing was over, and it had seemed small. The young queen had
laughed at it. But it was the beginning of that tremendous business
which was to fill all France with death and the destruction of
lovely stone; to sow a permanent division, to leave, much later,
the Bourbons supreme, and not even to end when the thirteenth Louis
should have ridden out to strike the last blow at La Rochelle--how
many years to come!
THE FRONTIER
(_September 9, 1642_)
Richelieu, the Cardinal, was growing old, his work was nearly
accomplished. It was the recovery of the frontiers, and on the south
those limits were the Pyrenees.
The long process of the hotch-potch of popular movement and feeling
over fifteen hundred years had blurred the outline of Gaul. It
was his business to restore an exact shape and a true wall to the
inheritance of the kings--“The Square Field.”
To the east the thing had never been possible, and perhaps never
will be. The Rhine stood clearly before all eyes. The Rhine could
be reached, but never made a final decision. Reached, it must be
crossed; but reached at one point it could not be reached in all.
There would ever be a struggle in those march lands. It is a struggle
woefully present to us to-day. Elsewhere the sea, the Alps, made
definite boundaries. There remained the Pyrenees.
But until this time the Pyrenees had not been attained. The tide of
Gallic power had overflowed them, and again had ebbed; and those
confused and noble valleys held races which overspread the crest,
and none of which had felt themselves at heart to be either of the
northern or of the southern land; neither of the pastures and the
rivers and the woods of Gascony, nor of the hard and burnt Iberian
rock and dust. Richelieu desired that crest and those limits, and
that long mountain boundary against the sky.
Where that singular straight line of division, the most unbroken
wall in Europe, reaches the Mediterranean, the Catalonian people
and their language held all the passes and spread to the north and
to the south, one nation--or at least one race. These, so early as
Charlemagne, had been the march of the Ebro, and Barcelona, the
great port, had remained the capital of one countryside. But in the
darkness after the death of Charlemagne no man could tell you whether
its fate would fall to the north or to the south. It acquired an
independence which at first was feudal, and might later well have
been national, as that of Portugal became, as that which little
Andorra still holds in its fantastic isolated cup. Through the Middle
Ages the thing had swung now to the French, now to the Spaniards,
but still was Catalan: one thing. The genius of Richelieu, to the
disadvantage of that entity, to the advantage of his sovereign, was
to divide it by the crest of the Pyrenees, and to push the writ of
Paris up to that sombre line where the peaks go down in lessening
but rugged summits, and lose themselves in the salt--diminishing to
mere rocks at last. For Richelieu had determined, not that all the
Catalonian land, but only this province--this northern province of
it, the Roussillon, hither of the Pyrenees--should be French; the
rest he would leave to Spain.
He played for the furtherance of this end upon a spirit which he
flattered and nourished, but did not fulfil--the spirit of Catalan
independence.
The great Spanish monarchy, almost the master of the world, had,
in the century before, firmly established itself over the whole
Peninsula, suppressing local liberties, centralizing, despotic.
Against that awful monarchy, against its symbol, the angry Catalans
had risen; and, supporting that rising in the enormous duel between
the house of Spain and the house of France, Richelieu had permitted
the rebels to elect his master their Count.
On January 23, 1641, following upon treaties of alliance between the
Catalan rebels and the French Crown, Louis XIII. was admitted Count
of Barcelona, monarch of all that country on either side of the
hills. But the game which Richelieu played had not Barcelona for its
stakes; he was gambling for the Roussillon only, and for Perpignan.
All the strength of Castille, all the men Spain could spare from the
universal war, were poured into the defence of Perpignan, and La Rena
was sent as governor to hold that northern bastion, and prevent the
French advance to the Pyrenees.
The town lies sloping downwards westward from its citadel. It stands
in a sheet of vineyards; a plain having to the east, solemnly
dominating it, all the huge mass of the Canigou. La Rena held it
strongly. He would quarter his soldiers upon the townsmen. They
resisted. He turned his guns from the citadel upon the burghers, and
they surrendered, but not before nearly six hundred of their houses
had been ruined by the fire. They had attempted a truce; the bishop
had gone up to the citadel with the Sacrament in a procession. They
obtained no truce; goods were looted, gallows were raised in the
market-place, and Olivares, the great minister of the Spanish king,
was supreme.
So Perpignan was held in that summer of 1641 for Spain.
The plain around was flooded with the French. South, north, east,
west of the city their eight thousand infantry, their two regiments
of cavalry, garrisoned the villages and towns, until at last, by
the end of the year, Perpignan itself was blockaded, and before any
siege lines were formed a famine had begun. In that winter, in the
January of 1642, the struggle opened between the two powers. Brézé,
coming to Catalonia as the Viceroy of Louis XIII., sat down before
Perpignan; but he could not quite cut off relief--some wheat got in
before the end of the month. From Castille no further troops could
come in relief. Still the French flooded on, La Meilleraye at their
head; and with him, second in command, a name that was to be more
than famous--Turenne.
By April the last of the small desperate Spanish garrisons in the
neighbourhood of Collioure had surrendered, but Perpignan still held.
All France seemed to be pressing on to that one point. The Cardinal
himself took the long journey, fell ill, and stopped at Narbonne. His
master, the king, Louis XIII., went forward, and on the 23rd May took
up his station in the farm which used to be called the Mas of John
Pauques, which is still known to-day as the King’s Farm; near St.
Stevens, looking upon the city.
By this time all Europe looked on.
The cavalry of the guard was there: Enghien, Polignac, Cinq-Mars,
Schomberg--all the great names; and the musketeers of the Cardinal
were there as well. Nearly thirty thousand men stood thus before the
walls, which had become the test of whether the government of Paris
should or should not come up to the Pyrenees.
Behind those walls, unsuccoured, the last veterans of the Thirty
Years’ War--not three thousand of them, and of these but a nucleus
Castillian--still held. They were the men whom all Europe had learnt
to regard as masters, but the odds were too great. They could stand
one to ten, even famished, behind a formidable trench and wall, but
as they stood they died of the fever and of the famine.
As the heat grew, and as the grapes began to show their first
clusters in the great sweep of vineyards under that mound which
watched the drama from the west, the two captains, Avila and Cavabro,
refused to treat. The citizens had been made their slaves. The
citadel was their vantage ground, and from it a ceaseless pillage
ruined the town. If ever the moral force of civilians counts in war,
it was here accumulated against the fierce and terrible captains of
Castille, as strong as iron in pride, but now doomed.
Every animal in the place was eaten. The citizens were thrown back
upon the rooks and the rats; the wounded in the hospital ate the
straw of their beds, and men were seen in the streets of the city
gathering the weeds of the wayside.
The captains of Philip IV. still held.
He made a desperate effort at relief. He drove the French from
Barcelona; but he could not find more men, harassed as he was all
over Europe, for that one essential point of Perpignan. A little body
came up under Torrecusa; La Mothe-Houdancourt held it off beyond the
hills.
It was the height of summer, and under the burning sun the ill
fortune of the Spanish star saw to it that, as a last resort, a fleet
attempting a diversion by the coast should have a tempest raised
against it and should fly to the Balearics.
Then it was at last that Avila despaired. But even then he could not
sign a capitulation. He signed only a document by which he pledged
himself to surrender if no help should come before a date which was
discussed by the starving men and fixed at last upon the 9th of
September. The 9th of September came; no succour had arrived. The
gates were opened, the keys delivered, and the play was done.
The Castillians had demanded and obtained the honours of war. The
French in two ranks saw passing between them the haggard remnant of
all this heroism, still attempting some severity of demeanour. A
generous instinct had moved the French command to see that none of
the Catalans, none of the town folk in their hatred of the Spanish
garrison, should be seen. It was the northern soldiers of Louis XIII.
who held them back as the tiny garrison marched out, concealing its
weakness under a mask of order and of discipline.
Their officers saluted the French flag, and at their head Avila rode
one of the last horses. The ceremony was over; the Castillians, not
prisoners, were outside the lines.
Avila dismounted, knelt upon the ground, looked south towards Spain
and to the arms of Spain upon the gate. His eyes were full of tears.
As he knelt he raised his right hand towards the town, and made a
great sign of the Cross against the sky, so bidding it farewell for
ever.
It was by the Canet Gate that these few heroes went forth after the
last effort for their king. It was by the Gate of Elne that there
marched in at the same moment the fresh, the well-fed, strong-bodied
northern Frenchmen, six thousand strong, and behind them an immense
train of wagons, filled with wheat, barley, oats, bread ready-baked,
bacon and fresh meat--food for a year.
In the Cathedral of St. John the Archbishop of Narbonne and the
Bishops of Nîmes and Albi, crowded around by the enthusiastic men
of the Catalans, sang the Te Deum. But far off in the Escorial,
Olivares, having heard the news, leant for the moment against the
stone wall, and the palm of his left hand pressed upon it, and then
moved towards the little room where the king was still reading and
signing his papers.
He fell upon his knees and wept, and said that it was time that he,
Olivares, should, by his own wish, die; and even so, he dared not say
the words that would give the reason of his despair. He waited until
his master spoke and asked him what so moved him.
“Sire,” said that strong man, sobbing, and still upon his knees, “you
have lost Perpignan!”
Then Philip answered in a low voice, but gravely: “We must submit to
the will of God.”
THE EXILE
(_December 30, 1688_)
There are many squares of soil where the histories of nations touch
and the fate of the one is intermixed with the fate of the other upon
a few roods of land.
There are the battlefields, of course--but that is obvious. There
are the conference rooms: the rooms in which treaties were signed;
though most treaties do not mean very much to history, some are of
prodigious effect--witness the Treaty of the Pyrenees. There are the
universally sacred sites--like the pavement of St. Peter’s, old and
new. There are the sites of Decisions, like the quays of Calais; like
the palaces of Vienna--where the agents of Governments have met and
have doubtfully decided, for a little time, the inferior interests of
men--the mechanical interests of men.
But there are also less known places where the fates of nations met
oddly, sharply, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes unfruitfully.
For instance, just outside Montreuil, two coaches passed each other
in the night--the one going north, the other going south. The one
going south was that of the British envoy prepared for war with the
French Republic in 1793; the one going north was that bearing the
French envoy with orders to prevent war if possibly that could be
done.
Of those squares of land, one is not as famous as it should be. It
is the land upon which stands the seventeenth-century palace of St.
Germains, with the terrace just outside overlooking the plain of the
Seine and the low grey line of Paris far beyond, and the distant,
diminished towers of St. Denis.
Had the Stuarts returned to the throne of England, that place
would be famous enough. It would be counted as the point of their
departure, as the rallying place of their cause, as the seed of a
new time. It would be a place of national pilgrimage and sacred in
English eyes; for there it was that James II., the rightful English
king, came as an exile to meet his cousin of France. But the Stuarts
did not return; and, therefore, the incident has been pushed away
into the lumber-room. There is thought to be something futile about
St. Germains. Even Culloden is more famous.
Yet St. Germains has good material for a shrine. It remains just
what it was. The past lives there. It is what it is, although success
did not follow on the meeting it saw. It is precisely what it would
have been had success followed that meeting. It is still itself. I
could wish that the tragedy of that palace were better known.
Mary of Modena had come over hurriedly with the child, the heir
to the English throne. She had been housed in this palace by the
gratitude, the courtesy, and the high policy of Louis XIV., King
of France. She was the Queen of England, and the usurpers were
(officially) of no account to Versailles. The fatigue of the journey,
of the alarms, of the perils, had oppressed the young woman; she had
taken to her bed. In a fine cradle, worthy of royalty, swinging in
the same room, lay that little baby who was later to be James III.,
and never to reign.
Louis XIV. had returned to visit this lady; he had come to her
bedside again, making obeisance and reverence, as king to queen. They
awaited James himself, for they knew that if he could escape the
plots of his enemies he would reach them. The news had come of his
landing. He had reached port in the dead of the Christmas dark, at
three in the morning. He had travelled down from the sea-coast with
haste. He came in no very great state to the doors of that palace,
late upon this December (for the French this January) day. The
weather was stormy; he had had no relief from travel; his great boots
were splashed with mud, and the tails of his long coat also; and his
odd, energetic, somewhat pinched face showed his fatigue. Yet he was
the King of England, and kingship was the high political note of the
time. He was the son of Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I. No one
had a moment’s right against himself--least of all his disappointed,
soured, usurping daughter; his alien, vicious, usurping son-in-law.
The man who had had, in varying proportions, ill-fortune to oppress
him, ill-judgment to urge him on (but much more ill-fortune than
ill-judgment), this courageous, intelligent, tenacious, but now
defeated man, stepped down unaided, but awkwardly, from the coach. He
was cramped by his journey.
Notice had been given to Louis XIV., sitting there by the bedside
in the room above; and that great king, holding the highest throne
in Europe, came down at once, almost eagerly, almost forgetting the
ritual of his position, to honour such an occasion and such an exile.
The rain still fell slantwise in the open courtyard of that palace of
brick and cornered stone. Louis XIV., in plumed hat, and cloak, and
sword, and buckled shoes, walked through the weather, indifferent,
his gentlemen about him--walked, I say, even eagerly, with some
forgetfulness of what he owed to his own royalty, so sharply did he
feel the strength of the occasion.
They met under the arch of the portcullis where the guard were
mounted, on the house side of the drawbridge, and in that meeting
there was something consonant to the ideas of their time, grotesque
to those of ours. For you must know that the men of that time bowed
low to their superiors--lower and lower in proportion, not to their
own inferiority, but to the greatness of him whom they saluted.
Now, here were two equals--the King of England and the King of
France--meeting to salute the one the other; so each bowed lower and
lower as they approached, each sweeping his hat in his hand before
him, and modulating his steps exactly as the ritual of that time
demanded: the left foot advanced, then the right at right angles to
it, in something more like a dance than a walk.
With all this they must give each other the accolade: they were
equals; they must embrace as equals. So the arms of the one man,
bowed down and obeisant with his head (a large wig upon it), were
spread out, inviting, upon either side of his body, the right hand
holding the large plumed hat, the left hand making gestures with its
fingers in the air.
At last, in such a progress, the two bodies must meet; and so they
did. The reception of the one to the other was what we, to-day,
mocking such things, might compare to the beginning of a wrestling
match. But the onlookers had no such profanity in their minds. For
them (and they were right) this strange ceremony was a high symbol.
The Great King was treating the ruined Exile as an equal, and some
future might be built upon such a foundation. The Stuarts might yet
return. For that meeting--to us, as we call up its physical details,
grotesque; to them, sublime--might well have been the beginning of a
true Restoration, and of an England happier and better than she has
been--perhaps less wealthy.
It was not so to be. The ceremony was sterile. It bred no issue.
There was to come the Boyne, the ’Fifteen, the ’Forty-five--and
nothingness; at last a grave in Rome, and that small, noble memorial
in St. Peter’s, which I, for my part, never pass without a movement
of the heart. The Stuarts were not to return.
* * * * *
Next day the great king came back to his exiles at St. Germains, and
later in the week he came once more. Each time he visited them with
an increasing sincerity and fervour of support. He leaned long over
the cradle and gazed down at the little Heir of England, with more
feeling than he had been known to show in looking at any of his own
children.
But, high above men, the fates had decided and the stars were set.
For business of this sort works out very slowly; and not within the
lives of two or three men that meet, but in many generations, are
the ultimate purposes accomplished; and though the Stuarts did not
return, perhaps they are to watch their revenge.
THE MONEY-LENDER
(_May 6, 1708_)
A fine day in May, and the spring had been early that year. The
trees were well out. A soft wind under a benignant sun came up from
the valley of the Seine, through the woods, and blessed the formal
new greatness of Marly; the splendour and melancholy of the great
water-basins, the majesty of the walls, were still new. The trees had
not yet that height which adds nobility to the noble lines of the
place. But already there was upon it the stamp of so great a reign.
Largeness and order and perfection of proportion were everywhere.
The palace stood alone, its dependencies grouped about it with a
space between. The front court and approach were deserted; but in the
grounds behind groups had formed: knots of courtiers were discussing
some coming thing, and all the life of the monarchy was disturbed in
that fine spring leisure, both in the great rooms of the palace and
in the gardens.
Twelve pavilions or lodges stood in formal order round behind the
main building, the lawns between. They were habitations for men
and women favoured of the king. Before one of these stood a man
whose long acquaintance with affairs on the one hand, with the
Court upon the other, had not quite rid him of awkwardness; for he
remembered his humble birth. It was Desmarets, the Controller of
Finance, a man of fifty. By his side, of equal age, stood, simply
dressed, demure, but a little sullen, a stout figure, odd in such
surroundings--Bernard the Jew. One or two others talked to him,
some commonplaces or other, as they thus stood before the pavilion.
It looked like a chance group; yet it was designed. And why it was
designed one must go back some weeks, some months, to understand.
* * * * *
Desmarets, coming back to the control of Louis XIV.’s finance in the
winter before that spring, in the February, knew not which way to
turn for monies in the conduct of the war. He bethought him of one
who had become the richest man in Europe--Bernard the Banker.
He knew his task to be difficult: the credit of the king was bad,
the war was a bottomless pit, swallowing million after million, the
security of the taxes was exhausted; he also knew Bernard by repute:
that repute was not in favour of the task.
Bernard was a man notoriously cold in judgment--and notoriously
right. So it was that he had built up his immense wealth. He had been
born the son of an artist, an etcher and engraver, indifferent to
anything but his art. He had been born the son of one of those Jewish
men of talent, whose every mark it is to concentrate wholly upon the
business of their lives, without concern for wealth, or even (very
much) for fame. From such a beginning, young in such surroundings,
Samuel Bernard the younger had re-acted toward a patient accumulation
of gold. His art, his task, had been that. Amply had he succeeded;
but when Desmarets approached him in the desperate crisis of that
year, not a gold piece was forthcoming.
In those days men were free, and the rulers of a state could not ruin
them for a whim--even a whim of war. How, then, was Bernard to be
persuaded?
Desmarets had seen the king, and what followed here at Marly was the
fruit of what the king had heard.
Desmarets had told the king that not a gold piece was forthcoming.
Bernard was hard as a rock. He had wasted no time in courtesy. He had
not even wasted time on insult; he had not sneered with the sneer
that is common to such occasions. He had said, simply and briefly
enough, that there was no security. Where might not such a beginning
lead? The money would be poured out like water upon sand. The war was
interminable, and the people could bear no more taxes. In our time a
man like Desmarets could have threatened. In that time he could not
threaten, but he bethought himself of something else, and it was upon
this something else that he had spoken to the king.
Hence it was, these few months after, in the opening of the spring,
in the May following that February, that he, Desmarets, and Bernard,
happened to be standing near the pavilion at the back of the palace
of Marly. Bernard sullen, as I have said, and wondering why he had
been asked here to no purpose; Desmarets affecting indifference and
leisure, but inwardly on thorns.
Just as this waiting of theirs was getting too awkward (Desmarets
wondering how much longer it would last, Bernard wondering what it
was all about, and almost proposing to go) there appeared, sauntering
towards them with dignity and at leisure, speaking in low tones
to the couple that were with him (and who showed an exaggerated
deference in their demeanour), a man of singular appearance.
It was the king.
He was seventy years of age. His years showed, not in his gait (for
that had always been leisurely and dignified), nor in his carriage,
for his pride kept him upright to the end; nor even in his body,
dressed as it was for his part. He had a double chin, but not
exaggerated; the strong, continuous line of his arched nose and high
forehead showed now in profile even more than they had done in his
youth; his mouth was firm; his eyes, though veiled with age, were
still vigorous. Where you saw the approach of his end was in the
fatigue of the face at its sides--the many wrinkles at the corners of
the eyes, the weakening flesh of the cheeks, and the slight droop at
the corners of the lips. But a man accustomed throughout a lifetime
to full command, and commanding with vigour and with judgment,
he remained to the end inspired by such a spiritual posture. He
was about to demean himself spiritually very much indeed, but the
garments, the exteriors of dignity, he never lost.
When he had come within a few yards of Desmarets and of Bernard, he
looked up as though surprised to see them, while they uncovered and
bowed.
“Why, Desmarets,” said he, “whom have you here?”
“It is Mr. Samuel Bernard.”
“I thought as much.... Mr. Bernard,” Louis added, as though it were a
sudden thought and a pleasant one, “I wonder if you have ever looked
round my gardens here at Marly?”
The king’s companions stepped back somewhat, and left him alone with
those other two. Bernard replied with an awed mumble.... His whole
being was filled with the greatness of the occasion.
It was one thing to be proud of his money and to found himself upon
it solidly in his office with some fellow or other who had risen to
the control of the finance, and who might be called Desmarets. It was
another to be in the presence of Louis XIV. He felt himself a little
weak at the knees, and yet happy to be in a new heavenly world. He
bowed awkwardly again at the wrong time, and once again he mumbled.
“Why,” said the old king, with a false sprightliness and affected
gaiety, “you _must_ see my gardens.... Come with me.... Desmarets,”
he added, turning to that courtier with an assumed ease, “I will
not deprive you long of Mr. Bernard’s company; I am sure you will be
eager to have him back. I only want to show him the gardens.”
Desmarets bowed again in a trained manner, Bernard awkwardly; and the
king took Bernard off to see the gardens: a nice little way-mark in
the social history of Europe!
One companion the king kept with him as a sort of foil, for with
Bernard alone he would have felt like a man alone with a monster.
Louis dared not trust himself with Bernard alone, therefore did he
keep that one companion as a foil. But the companion was to remain
silent while Louis did the honours.
“Are not they well chosen, these chestnuts? Not one has failed!...
They are young yet, Mr. Bernard. _You_ will see them grow tall....
But I am an old man.... Their alignment is perfect.”
Bernard said in a husky voice, forcing himself to speak, “All these
hills are market-garden country. The soil is good. The best trees are
nourished here....” Then he added, “Sire,” and gulped.
The king approved his judgment.
“You are right, Mr. Bernard,” he said, trying to be as little pompous
as he could. “You are curiously right.... It is a most interesting
view.” He then added (lying), “Few have remarked this. It is most
interesting that you should have remarked it. We have here at Marly
an excellent soil for the rapid growth of great trees. Now I see
there a poplar: we have also poplars ... but their arrangement
seems to me a little spoilt by the cross paths. There is something
irregular about the genius of these trees. I should have had them set
farther back, as with a hint of forestry.”
Saying this, the king halted, leaned back, gazed at the unoffending
poplars with severity, then turned, looked at Bernard, and smiled
painfully.
“Your Majesty is right,” said Bernard. “You are right ...”
(correcting himself), “Sire.”
The banker had not meant the phrase to be blunt, yet Louis restrained
himself like a man who feels a sudden pain; then he continued
rapidly, and as though to forget what had just passed,--
“You have studied gardens, Mr. Bernard?” (Without waiting for an
answer) “They are the most charming of studies. They never grow
stale. There is a book I must show you” (he shuddered inwardly as
he said it), “the plans of which perpetually please me, though they
are only plans. I conjure up gardens as I look at them. One is at
Tarbles.... I shall never see it” (a little sadly), “but I almost
seem to know it from the plans.”
Bernard answered, “One must always see the plan first,” and there
was silence for a full sixty seconds as they continued that mortal
progress. But Bernard already trod on air for all his bulk and for
all his furious shyness in such company.
The king, without glancing sideways (which would have been an
unkingly thing to do), gauged in his mind the distance between the
place which they had reached and the point to which they must return.
He decided to suggest the return.
Now when the king would suggest a change of direction from one path
to another, those of the Court needed no direction. Their eyes were
upon the master, who was also the nation, and, for that matter, the
summit of Europe; and while they said this or that, in the careful
wit of their time, they saw exactly which way the royal hands waved,
and which way the royal feet were turning.
Not so Bernard; he had not the habit. Therefore, when the steps of
Louis turned to the right, to go back towards the pavilion by the
farther path, the banker almost stumbled into the king.
Louis, with perfect restraint, half halted for a moment. Bernard
recovered himself and murmured an apology of the middle classes. The
king was too well-bred even to hear it, and the retreat upon Marly
began.
There was no awkwardness. The same fatuous phrases--or if not
fatuous, only not fatuous because there was tradition behind the
whole affair--proceeded one after the other from the lips of France;
the same rare, uncertain agreement, increasingly filled with awe,
came, murmured rather than spoken, from the lips of Bernard.
He was returned to Desmarets. The goods were delivered.
It had been a wonderful quarter of an hour for Bernard! The king
had shewn him Marly! He could say all his life, and his children
could say to their children, “The king himself took me all round his
gardens at Marly!” To tell the full truth, he hardly knew what he had
seen. He remembered six young chestnuts and a mist of poplars, and
he had been conscious of a Presence always there upon his left, and
that he was making history.
Already Bernard was a different man. The king, lingering just enough
to make the parting easy, moved off, erect, and, as it would have
seemed to a very acute observer, a little less restrained. A very
acute observer would have noted in the gesture of his arms and in
the carriage of his body, as Louis moved off, something of relief.
But only a very acute observer could have noticed this. It was the
slightest of slight changes.
Meanwhile Bernard, left behind, had become voluble. He began to
talk at large upon Marly, upon the glories of the gardens. He bored
Desmarets most damnably, but Desmarets affected an equal eagerness,
pretended surprise, put on a familiar astonishment at each new
detail, and with slow, familiar steps took Bernard back to his
sumptuous carriage at the gates. He held his smile well back as the
banker was helped into the cushions by absurdly obsequious servants.
He saw the splendid four horses stamp off down the big cobblestones
of the yard.
The man gone, Desmarets sat himself down frankly, without ceremony,
upon a bench, as though to rest from a great strain. A courtier came
up to him. He did not rise. The courtier said,--
“That’s all over!”
But Desmarets answered,--
“There is much more in Bernard than one might think.... I like him.”
Which was a lie.
And a very few days later the Crown began its drain of nine millions
upon Bernard.
THE CHÂTEAU
(_October 1759_)
There is a great house which stood once in the woods of a small
village some three miles from Versailles. It still stands, and woods
about it. I know it well.
It is built in the majestic and sober manner of its time--not quite
two hundred years ago; airy, in great suites of rooms, with the
windows lighting them from either side. The ground falls away from
before it in a park with tall trees forming a sweep of descending
lawn, and is faced by the enclosing hills, where the trees hide
all but the summit of a long, arched aqueduct, which furnished the
fountains of the king’s palace. The west illumines that slope at
evening; the summer sun sets behind the arches of that old, high
aqueduct on its ridges of the hills, and far away beyond, miles away,
are the farther hills, which are the threshold of the Vexin; while to
the right, to the northwards, lies mistedly the plain of the Seine.
In this house, in the very heart of the eighteenth century, and in
the crisis of its fate, Louis, the king of France, the fifteenth of
that name, sat waiting by the fire; for it was autumn, and they had
brought in chestnut logs from the woods and lit them.
The coach stood outside the glass-roofed porch, having just brought
its master--for he had come suddenly, capriciously, without warning,
as was his habit in these last years--and the Pompadour was within.
He sat there waiting for her, putting out his hands in a simple
gesture towards the fire, unwatched, alone; his fine deep eyes were
full of mood and reverie, and also of the beginnings of despair; but
he had come for companionship.
The brief two years of passion, the three years of intimacy, had
passed, but something more enduring remained in that strange soul
which could not tear itself away from any roots, and yet could not
act: full of energy within, of emotion, even of desire; but lacking
the strength to pierce that shell which cursedly fenced it from the
outside world. There he sat, waiting for the Pompadour, and still
putting out his hands to the warmth of the fire after the damp
coldness of that autumn drive.
In the vestibule without, four gentlemen whispered; and in the far
staircases of the place a discreet servant had brought the message
to his friend.
Before that fire, less lonely for his loneliness, the last of the
undisturbed kings, the last secure king of that tremendous line,
communed with his own mind.
It was not a communion of despair, though despair was creeping in
to the outer parts of his soul; it was a communion of hopeless
fatigue--not fatigue as yet of the body, but an impossible fatigue of
the soul; his body was still strong; his soul could still perfectly
use that instrument--yet there was nothing left; he had tried all
things. He had discovered in childhood how this half-divine position
cut him off from men. He had hated, he had accepted, he had used
his isolation; he had tried to be two men--and the end of that is
destruction. He had tried to be what all his duty should make him,
and yet to be a man surrounded by habits and by a domestic air. Under
the twin effort he had fallen to be a man entirely alone, yet with
certain friends; yet with one friend--no longer a lover, but notedly
a friend.
The restlessness which came of his unhappy mood stirred him as he
thus sat alone. He swung up suddenly from his chair, turned round,
peered here and there at ornaments in the room before him, looked
closely at a piece of Chinese work upon a shelf, thought it odd, yet
discovered at once its genius; then strolled to the long window upon
his right, and looked with eyes too full of reminiscence towards the
aqueduct and the wooded hill. The autumn evening was reddening, but
there was sun behind the clouds, and, far on the horizon, a shaft
of light against which St. Germains stood delicately.... All his
life had run in that little groove of one countryside--the Parisis.
He had lost power to feel other things, and yet he remembered one
or two longer drives, and he smiled as he thought of the noise, the
peril, the wind, the acclamations of Fontenoy, and the repose of that
battle-evening after victory.
It was more than four years gone; he was in the fifth year from that
great day. But five years seems long in what is still the active
middle of life. Too soon was he to know how five years would race by
in the degradation of sense, when the later years of a man have led
him into a closed labyrinth of lust.
As he still stood looking to the north through the window across that
afternoon autumn air, with the majesty of the high trees framing his
landscape, he heard a step he thought he knew. His attitude changed.
He started round. It died away again. She was long in coming!
He felt the chill of his place, and, sensitive to every slight
impression of the body, long steeped in immediate enjoyment of
every detail of luxury, he moved at once instinctively back to that
chair before the fire and sat him down again; but this time leaning
backwards, his arms on the arms of the gilded thing that supported
him, and a deeper reverie in his eyes.
The chestnut logs had caught; they made a murmuring which effaced
time and were a sort of lullaby. For some few moments he did not know
that he was waiting for a step and a voice, though they were those
of a friend. For some few moments he did but dream, and there passed
before his mind certain odd convictions which inhabited it, and
certain common terrors; both of these stood against a background of
disappointment and of nothingness.... None of his line could be lost
... none of his line could be lost.... St. Louis had baptized them
all into a sort of security.... If only the poor were not oppressed,
if only he were always master of the rich, and a true king, his soul
would be at last secure.... Nor was he too much to blame. These
awful and remote dignities of kingship must be counterweighted by
something human; it was a crying need; and affection, though passing,
was still affection.... There was no gallery of faces in his mind ...
he had been good to all these women, and would be good to all to come.
But there had now come upon him friendship. Though the particular
love had passed and all its habits, friendship remained; and
friendship, even to a man so jaded, was a profound thing.
Even as he thus mused he heard the step which was unmistakable, and
a particular voice greeting his gentlemen without salutations in the
vestibule. That charming voice answered their respect without any
insolence and yet with a certain frankness which was properly bred of
a great, a thoroughly exalted place now long enjoyed. Then the tall
white-and-gilt door was opened--one leaf of it--by a hand delicate
and poised, shut at once, and he took her hands.
Now at last he was at home, and for some few minutes the intolerable
tedium, the inexorable weight of what life had come to be for him,
would be lifted; the voice was enough for that, and the gestures,
and the more than kindness of the face; the sympathy in everything
of the senses, and common memories apparently unregretted, and
permitting her apparently (he did not deceive himself, he believed
it, though to her it was bitter enough), a powerful abandonment of
the past.
She had all that remains of youth in the beginning of her maturity,
which endeared her the more to him, and an acquiescence in this new
relation, in this frank friendship, which yet again endeared her to
him. Yes ... he was sure ... affection was a stronger motive with her
than the mere desire to retain a power in great affairs, though this
she also loved.
That fresh, that musical, that companionable voice soothed him,
supported him, and nourished him; he was steeped in home.
So those two sat together before that fire, using little names they
had used for so many years; he receiving what he had never known
with any other--I mean the maternity and the sisterhood of women,
so strongly reinforced by recently remembered, recently practised
love. She alone could ask him, without his first speaking, whether
he would not remain. (In the kitchens towards the _Ménage_ what
courses had she not prepared!) But the Furies were upon him again,
the cold Furies of the body and of the soul, the Furies of exhausted
passions, which led to no end, the Furies of the flesh. He could not
rest; he rose again. They had been together twenty minutes. It was
enough for him, and he could not think of her save as in relation to
himself. Yet was this man not selfish, only cursed; but this curse
could not now be lifted. He might once have conjured it away, not so
long ago--it was now too late.
The gentlemen in the vestibule drew themselves up as they heard his
step, not stiffly, but with just that rectitude which marked the
obeisance of great names to their master, and he and she went out,
talking almost gaily, to the doors of the coach. He gave her an
appointment, not for the morrow, for he had public business that he
hated, but for the morrow after, and at Versailles. He needed her
advice with the envoys, and she must meet these foreigners. Whereat
they smiled at each other. Then went he into his coach, and his
gentlemen with him. They drove up to the great iron gates before this
little palace; they turned to the right along the road to Versailles.
She went about her business in the house; she could not help but
listen with a part of her mind, strangely detached though it were, to
the last clatter of the horses beyond the wall; and neither he nor
she understood that the monarchy had been wasted, lost, thrown away.
THE THREE PLACES: FONTAINEBLEAU, MADRID, SARATOGA
(_October 16, 1777_)
The 16th of October is a date of some import in French annals. On
that day Marie Antoinette was killed before her Tuileries gardens.
On that day was Wattignies won: “The chief feat of arms of the
Republic.” On that day also--years before--were done, in three widely
distance places, four very different acts; if we see these acts,
first each separate, then all combined, they show us the magnitude
and the irony of our lives. Sharply do these four acts in these three
places illuminate the story of France and of the world.
* * * * *
For now two years the American colonies of England had been in
organized rebellion. The lingering of that war, its distance, its
varied and (in the eyes of Europe) petty episodes, had arrested
but not determined opinion. The enemies of England had watched it
at first with hope, then with anxiety, and at last with tedium. It
dragged out; its issue became more and more clear. The rebels all
together made up not half the colonists. Their active forces were but
a small fraction of the total manhood. Their failure was foredoomed.
The French monarchy (the great but increasingly embarrassed
counterweight to the growing power of London) had missed its chance
to strike. The issue was now certain: the colonies (already secured
through the defeat of the French before Quebec but a few years ago)
would now fall back to the English crown. No solid judgment could
doubt that. The drama was ending.
The very young King of France--large, lethargic, slow to comprehend
and slower to decide--had earned (over and above the effect of such
disabilities) the contempt of his immediate servants. It was not for
nothing that Louis XVI. was ponderous with German blood. To all this
was added a public negligence, for he had (and it was said, could
have) no heir. His young queen had entered that road of abrupt,
nervous dissipation, had sown that undeserved enmity, which together
would lead on to such a close. The whole air of the Court already
threatened. The great strains were at work beneath the even ritual
and weighted grandeur of what still governed the nation: the brick
behind the encrusted marble was giving way.
The end approached; but, before it came, an accident--a side
effect--was to arise. It seemed but a divergence at the time. It
proved itself, in its conclusion, something almost as large as the
revolution itself.
* * * * *
It was Thursday, the 16th of October, in the palace of Fontainebleau.
The Court of France had withdrawn thither for the autumn’s hunting.
Its concern was with its own splendour and with its innumerable
personal dramas. No large affair was toward.
The season was benignant, the woods were still gorgeous, the forest
beyond the palace was full of fruition and repose; something of a
late summer still lingered.
There had been hunting in the rides between the trees that day, but
long before sunset the most tardy of the followers had returned,
their mud upon them. Evening had come, the horses were stabled, the
day’s work was long over. The magnificence of the public banquet was
extinguished; even the eternal card-playing had tired itself out, and
the silence had come. In their distant rooms two separate men began
to work alone: each to think in silence before he put pen to paper.
One was Vergennes, the other Goltz.
Vergennes, Foreign Minister to the King of France, a man of sixty,
tried, careful, covered his face with his hand as he sat and wove
within his mind. His every energy had been bent to the undoing of
the war which had lost Canada--and much more. He sought an issue
and he found none. There had been a moment.... There had been a
moment.... Best when the formal declaration of independence was
known in Europe: recoverable that summer when the ships with the
American envoys on board had been seen from the British coast. But
the moment had passed.... He saw no issue. He considered the play of
the forces in Europe. He considered the decision of his master, the
king. He saw, as in a picture, the fleets and their balanced powers,
the prestige, the promptitude of the British admirals. He felt, like
the memory of a voice, the hesitation of any king to help rebels in
arms. He remembered the way in which the Spanish Court (Bourbons
also) had failed them. He feared it would fail them still. Spain
would not move. He stirred a moment, as though to rise and seek some
paper in a drawer. He lifted his hand from his eyes and blinked at
the candlelight. Then he sank back again. Of what purport could it
be to find the precise words? His one ally, the Spanish Court, had
failed him and would fail him. Perhaps they were right. The American
colonies could now claim no friends. Their sovereign was too strong,
and, after all, his rule was legitimate. The British would make good
at last.
All such meditation done, the man changed his place, pulled his chair
up towards the desk, settled his papers, and set him down to write.
It was more than deep night. For all the fast shut windows and heavy
curtains, one could smell the early morning. There was no sound in
the vast house. All slept (he thought) save him. In such a silence
and such a darkness he put down his judgment--that the Ministers of
George III. now thought themselves independent of the world; that
while it was true that the two Bourbon Courts must go warily, yet had
he worked hard and felt broken hearted. He paused a moment in his
writing, then set down, to guide himself, what was true enough, “He
had no wish for war.... But neither had he any wish for humiliation.
But what should he do if the triumphant British Government demanded
of him that he should treat the Americans as outlaws and as
pirates?” It was an inconclusive jumble: no more than the fixing of
his mind by repetition of what he had written publicly that day. Not
often do men of such powers leave work of such sort incomplete. But
he left it thus; summoned his servant, who had fallen asleep in the
room without, and himself went through the great doors to the inner
room to sleep.
In that same night, in another room, far more simply furnished, the
envoy of the Prussian king--Goltz--entered, in his precise idiom
and hand, another conclusion, which showed how all minds at that
instant worked together. He wrote down that the French had had their
opportunity and had lost it, and that George III. was now secure in
the mastery of the two worlds.
In Madrid, on that same night, Florida Blanca wrote for his master
also. He drafted advice, and made a memorandum of the advice he had
drafted. It was advice to his colleague of the Court of France.
It was a judgment of the King of Spain for his brother Bourbon of
France. There was but one thing to be done--regrettable, no doubt,
but necessary. Perhaps there had been a chance, but the chance was
lost. The immediate, the practical, unquestioned concern of any sane
man now was to walk very carefully where Britain was concerned.
Everything must be forgone which could even raise complaint from
St. James’s, for said he to himself, as he rose from this brief
exercise and made also himself for his own chamber: “The thing is now
settled and history cannot be re-written. It would have been better
otherwise, no doubt, but the American Colonies are destined to be
British Colonies again, and for ever. All that talk I have heard
young men indulge in, of a new State beyond the Atlantic, is young
men’s talk.”
At that phrase he smiled, and in his turn summoned his servants and
went to his repose.
* * * * *
But in the woods above the Hudson Valley, on the heights of Saratoga,
on that same Thursday, the 16th of October, 1777, a lost body of
only four thousand effectives all told, under the British general
Burgoyne, with its guns (not three dozen left), had completed its
surrender to the colonial levies. And in much those same hours of
which I speak, those European midnight hours and hours of the early
morning, the late evening of the West had seen this small thing
quite completed. A little force, such a force as to-day we might
almost put upon a couple of transports, had laid down its arms to an
uncertain gathering of irregulars.
And what a consequence!
Some three weeks later a rumour was abroad, no one knew why it
came, or how. Another week and men asked why it was that Ministers
in England said nothing of the Hudson, and spoke only of successes
elsewhere. Moved by we know not what instinct, Vergennes sat him
down at last and wrote a note insisting that the new State should be
recognized.
It was the 4th of December. Upon the very morrow the full news was
known. Upon the 6th the young king--Heaven knows with what hesitation
and with what future regrets--put, in his large round hand, at the
foot of that document, “Approved.” Upon the 8th Franklin and his
companions, sitting at Passy, wrote out and signed their acceptance
of the French Alliance.
THE END OF CHATEAUBRIAND
(_November 27, 1843–July 18, 1848_)
Chateaubriand was in England. He was at 35 Berkeley Square--a very
old man (he was in his seventy-fifth year), and nearer the tomb
than he knew. His legs, very thin and feeble, supported him ill.
His hands, gouty and knotted, trembled a little. Even his fine eyes
had lost much of their brilliance. He stooped in his slow walk, but
he was supported by pride. He had determined to return to England
where, fifty years before, in the eagerness of his young manhood, he
had first loved. For of all his unstable, self-reflecting, unrooted
adventures in those affairs, two only left something permanent with
him--one the parson’s daughter of his youth in Bungay, and the other
the strong friendship of his last hours. He returned to the country
where he had been ambassador and in the height of his fame.
It was the heir of France in exile who had bidden him come, and it
was certainly in loyalty to the throne--to that immemorial line,
to the institution which was the soul of his country, to the
Capetians--that the old man had made the journey. It was not for
memories of Bungay, still less for memories of the Embassy.
It was November--the most lonely month of the year. It was the 27th
of that month. Chateaubriand had already been in London three days.
The young heir of France in exile, the Comte de Chambord, bade him
to that house, giving him for his use all the ground floor (for the
great man dared not face stairs, though he still could move), and
when, the next day, the prince received, he had himself helped and
carried up to the main room, where a crowded mass of curious English,
of loyal or interested French, passed before the prince in exile
and bowed in turn to him. At the back of that crowd the Comte de
Chambord saw, standing with difficulty among the rest in the press,
the figure of the man whom he had brought at such a season overseas.
He moved towards him at once, vigorously and spontaneously; without
care for his own position at the moment; eager to salute the man
whose greatness he sincerely recognized, whose usefulness to the
throne had been a tradition for that younger generation (the prince
was but twenty-three), and whose name was at the moment greater than
any other name in France. He took both his poor gouty hands and said
Chateaubriand must not stand. He put a chair for him. He told him,
without flattery, that he depended upon his presence.
There was no one in that room like him, and Chateaubriand himself
complained how many French had stayed away from fear--he had also
complained, without reason, that official England had shunned the
exile--there was no one in that room, I say, but saw two figures
supreme among them: the exile, who later might, if he would, have
been king; and that old man of the laurels, who knew himself, and was
known by all of them already, to be a sort of immortal--such a pen
had he.
The reception was over, the blaze of candles extinguished, the old
man had been helped back again to his rooms below. He took paper and,
as best he could with his failing fingers, noted the points of what
next day he must dictate--as next day he did--to his last friend.
Next day also that long letter was written and remains to us. It has
a phrase upon the Comte de Chambord, upon Henry V., which is not to
be forgotten:--
“The kings would have done well to have saluted this young ghost of a
time outworn. They would have done well not to insult, as he passed,
a traveller who had nothing to show but a broken sceptre in his hand.
They laughed: they did not see that the world has grown tired of
them, and that time will force them at last to take that same road as
has been taken by the great royal line which protected them all and
lent them a life which fails them now.”
* * * * *
Chateaubriand was in the rue du Bac, in those rooms on the ground
floor where he was to end. The great windows opened upon a town
garden, dark with trees in spite of the light of July.
His friend, Jeanne Françoise Récamier, was awaiting, herself in old
age, ready to join him again.
Everything that he had been, all that had made up himself--his
vivacity and changeableness of love, and tenacious hate--seemed to
have departed, and he lay as though he had already fallen into the
power of death, though his eyes still shone. He heard, but with
difficulty. He spoke hardly at all, and then in but few, murmuring
words. Over his paralysed body they had thrown a coverlet, upon which
his hands lay still. He was waiting for the advent of the friend
whose friendship alone remained to him of life. But she herself, who
had been the most famous of beautiful women as he had been the most
famous of lyrical men, had come also to the term of things; and those
eyes of hers, which had held captive a generation, were now nearly
blind. As he so lay, awaiting her, there returned to his weakened
mind a certain phrase of his own writing not so long before, where he
had spoken of human affection and had said of love that time changes
our hearts as it does our complexion and our years. Nevertheless
there is one exception amid all this infirmity of human things, for
it does come about sometimes that in some strong soul one love lasts
long enough to be transformed into a passionate friendship, to take
on the qualities of duty, and almost those of virtue. Then does
love lose the decadence of our nature and lives on, supported by an
immortal principle.
She to whom--or rather, round whom--those words were written was
brought in, a ghost of the past, as he was a ghost of the past, to
sit by him as he lay there, silent and deafened, on the edge of
death. There could pass very little between them. They had neither of
them the strength to speak at any length: nor she in a voice which he
could well hear, nor he in a voice strong enough to reach her ears.
But her presence was a final consolation.
When she left him after that singular interval of communion and
silence he slept a little, and the next day he knew that his end had
come.
It was Sunday, the 2nd of July. Outside, in the streets, the noise of
the popular revolt had hardly died down, and contrasted with that too
great energy of sound and of young fury was this silent room opening
upon the garden, and the figure lying there. He asked in a whisper
for the Sacraments--he who had said in a phrase which showed the man
like lightning: “No Christian believes as I do, nor is any man more
sceptical than I.”
On the next day, Monday, the 3rd, his life still dragged on and
diminished, yet he whispered to his nephew, who took down the words
from his lips: “I declare before God my retraction of all there may
be in my writings contrary to the Faith, to good morals, and in
general to the principles which are conservative of good.” And his
nephew put down beneath those lines: “Signed for my uncle, whose hand
can no longer sign.” He had the declaration read to him; he tried to
read it with his own failing eyes. Yet another night dragged on; but
it was not until Tuesday, the 4th, that he died, and there had come
back to that death-bed the friend, the old woman--Madame Récamier.
Besides her there was but his nephew, his confessor, and a Sister of
Charity. It was a little after eight in the morning. The priest and
the Sister of Charity were kneeling at the end of the bed; the two
others stood and saw his passing.
So he died.
* * * * *
A fortnight later, upon Tuesday, July 18, 1848, they brought the body
of Chateaubriand for burial to the place which he had chosen. That
insecure, moving, intense soul of his was steeped in its own time,
thinking that sublime which to-day we think grotesque, and which
to-morrow our descendants may think sublime again. He had determined,
in his passion for things both singular and glorious, in his vanity,
but also in his love of greatness, upon a peculiar tomb, and it was
now to receive him.
The Cathedral of Saint Malo was filled with the sailors of the place,
with peasants come in from the countryside, with the clergy of the
province, with all the officials of the town and even of Rennes--a
vast crowd. They laid the coffin in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart,
blazing with candles, and all that afternoon and all night long the
crowd kept pouring in to pass by this lying-in-state and to pray, in
a stream that did not end hour after hour.
On the next day, the Wednesday after the last Mass to be said over
him, the runners harnessed the horses, and the whole train set out
for that rock which is an island at high tide and in which his tomb
had been cut. It had been placed for him alone, and he had ordered--a
last singularity--that there should be no name or inscription upon
it whatsoever. As they laid him in his tomb the guns sounded a
last salute, the walls of the city were covered with men and women
watching that strange sight, and even the rocks to seaward and along
the shore were black with people. They say that fifty thousand stood
by and saw the sight.
And there he is to-day; and no one can say at all whether, with the
passage of time, he who was at that moment the greatest of the great
will become greater still, or insignificant.
A SOLDIER OF ’70
(_June 1870_)
In the height of a scorching summer, in June 1870, a young man, tall,
lean, long in features, active in gesture, something fanatical, with
deep-set and fixing eyes, pushed a perambulator (of all things!)
along a pavement of the South Bank in Paris. By his side was the
mother of the child: nor was she his wife.
I have said “young man,” but in years he was a boy. He was but
twenty years old. That household he had set up was a curious
adventure indeed. His parents, as he thought, knew nothing of it;
and perhaps he was right. The strict laws of the French family would
have forbidden a marriage. But his allowance was sufficient and his
happiness was complete. At that age one is immortal; and as he lived
in an undefeated society at the height of its hope and wealth, as he
had himself hope and wealth beneath him in the largest measure for
his foundation, nothing mattered but the intensity of his affection
in this opening of his life.
There he was, in this comically small domestic manner, at the summit
of whatever this life can bring, and trusting rightly to chance for
the regulation of all things.
It was, I say, in the middle of that burning summer, and if the
foreign affairs of the country were talked of at all (after small but
supposedly splendid foreign victories), they were for him and his
like but newspaper talk. They did not touch realities between waking
and sleeping.
There was this difference between him and his like--that he had in
him a certain material which could catch fire, and having caught fire
would blaze unfed until he should die.
Ten weeks later this young man, or boy, having volunteered, was on
the field of Sedan. The capitulation was announced; the men were
already beginning to pile arms, and he, by a chance, was arguing with
certain bearers who were moving a body. They maintained that the man
was dead; he said that he was alive. He had his way, and he proved
right. This also was a sharp point in his life, which he remembered
always, even more clearly than any other episode of that disaster:
how, while it was yet full light, he had argued with the bearers. The
man whom he had saved he kept close to years after, making him a
friend; for they went off as prisoners together into the Germanies.
That young man broke prison, and found his way to the Rhine and
farther. He spoke no German; he did but ask his way; and when he
had reached his own country again he went to the nearest centre and
re-enlisted.
They sent him to the Loire. All this while he had heard nothing from
his own people, or from what was nearer to him than his own people.
So he served through that memorable and terrible winter under Chanzy,
and saw the failure to relieve the capital. In those snows he came of
age.
He did not see Paris again until he came there with the rank
of captain in the troops of Thiers, for the suppression of the
Commune. It was against one of the last barricades, near the foot
of the Northern Hill, that he received his third wound in all that
fighting, national and civil. To his old age he remembered that
scene as a comedy for all its slaughter. He saw himself something
of a chromo-lithograph, waving a sword and leading his men, who
were Bretons. He turned his face toward the barricade, and at that
moment saw, peering between two stones, the face of a boy younger
than himself--a boy in no uniform, with a bandolier slung over
the blue canvas of his blouse. He saw the boy’s musket resting
on the stones and pointed towards him. He remembered that it was
singularly fore-shortened ... and almost in the same instant that
he saw this thing he felt as though a horse had kicked him with
full strength on the left arm. He fell down, stunned, without pain;
but a very few moments afterwards, as they carried him back, the
pain grew intolerable. It was the worst thing he had suffered in
all those months, and it was a day before the confusion of his
thoughts relaxed. When his mind grew slowly clear again, he saw (more
vividly than the dirty walls of the gaunt ward in which he lay) the
barricade, and the boy in the blue canvas, and the fore-shortened
barrel.
* * * * *
All these enormous things had run their course, and reached a
settlement: the empire gone, Prussia supreme, the nation half
murdered--a stillness and bitterness over everything. That which
had been his life such a very little time before had ceased for him
altogether. Some who read this would know too well whom I mean if I
were to give the details of his misfortune, or of how he followed,
but only at a distance, and supported his child: of how he learnt
that the mother had left him for ever.
Note this strange thing: that to this young man, even now not yet in
his twenty-third year, the torrents of violent emotion had settled
into a sort of lake; a permanent feeling, profound, unchangeable,
nourishing an unvarying output of appeal. Whatever he had lived,
in whatever ways, his own small concealed home, his family for a
moment estranged, his tradition and his proud name--all these had
distilled into a lyrical patriotism, the fruits of which seemed at
first more than half contemptible to the hard French temper about
him. Those fruits took many forms. In the first place, he expended
his whole self in a perpetual and open insistence upon the necessity
for raising the nation against its conqueror; and this he did in
a society where all such open and direct expression is greeted as
insufficient and unworthy.
He acted thus, ingenuous and direct, in the midst of a Paris and of
a France especially bent upon reserve, and he maintained that form
of expression in spite of a much ridiculing and, what wounded him
more, a patronizing affection. Through all his youth, through all his
manhood, on into his middle age and to the verge of old age, this
exalted mood affected him to verse, most of it of the second-rate
sort; all of it rhetorical; all of it sincere. You may guess how this
popular versifying jarred on the critical French ear and soul.
There was no occasion during thirty years, during forty years, in
which he did not make it his business to preach continually the duty
of reassertion and of warring down a conqueror who had become now
assured in strength and rooted, and of whose achievement and mastery
there seemed at last no question. It was the moment when Renan said:
“France is dying. Let us not brawl at her death-bed.”
Long after Alsace-Lorraine had become mere names to a younger
generation which knew nothing of the war, through mighty civil
contests of opinion and even of religion (which the French alone
wage in our time), his simple note sounded continually: at first
acclaimed by the poor; always ridiculed by the too-cultured or the
too-fatigued: latterly almost grotesque, still sounding in a world
which had completely changed. In some part of his expression he had
aged prematurely. In body he was still alert, though his last illness
was upon him; in the vigour of his gesture, the fire of his glance,
he was more than he had ever been.
By the year 1912--so oddly do human things turn about in the short
unit of one lifetime--his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his
perpetual insistence, had become a sort of institution for the
nation. Societies love to take those of an older generation and to
make them symbols. Even his literary insufficiency was half forgiven,
and men talked of him as a sort of curious relic from the days when
war was possible, and when the glory of a national rehabilitation
(now impossible) could be reasonably entertained. But with this
position of his among his fellow-citizens (which was quaintly mixed
up with the love we bear for ancient things, almost because they are
odd, and largely because we are sure they can never return) there
now went something of grandeur. He was now, they said, an old man;
and his very insistence in harping upon so single and so unfertile a
theme had given him his definite place. And just as men would say,
“So and so is now our great poet, So and so our great actor, So and
so this, and So and so that,” in the same way they pointed to the man
now grown old and said, “He, of course, is our great patriot,” but
they said it with a smile. One man, however, who loved him, called
him “Tyrtæus”: quizzically enough, I think.
No one thought it possible that his war would come.
His illness grew upon him fast. By one of those accidents which show
the lives of men to be ordered, as the parts of an actor are ordered
upon the stage, this man died just in those days before the war, when
it was far too late for any man to remember great wars in Western
Europe as a reality, and still some weeks too early for men to have
grown uneasy and to think they already heard the guns. But as though
so simple, so direct, and so very great a life were a presage, his
funeral made a great picture.
There was a sort of silence after his death, like that which comes
before a storm. Nor was the moment long delayed.
Upon a certain day, memorable to all of us, the Cabinet of Berlin
presented a brief note to the Government of Paris. Prussia would
fight in the East, and demanded as a guarantee the frontier garrisons
of the French, over and above a promise of neutrality. We know the
reply, and we know what followed.
The first young men to cross the frontier in arms (which was in the
pine forests on the crests of the Vosges) pulled up the frontier
post for a trophy. There was no discussion as to what should be done
with that trophy. The decision seemed inevitable. It was sent back
to be set upon this man’s grave, and there I saw it the other day.
It had been set up hurriedly, and was leaning a little sideways.
It always remains in my mind as the most significant monument in
Europe. The grave is in a small cemetery upon the country hills which
lie to the west of Paris, a cemetery so domestic and of such small
consequence to the little village it belongs to that no good road
leads to it, but the dead of the village are brought up from the main
road a quarter of a mile off by bearers who follow a rough track.
Up this track, with a ritual dear to the French people, did certain
delegates bear that frontier post, as we bear dead men for whom we
proclaim the resurrection. They took it through the rustic gate into
that small, neglected place, and put it upon the grave of the man
who had lived so strange and inartistic a life: who stirred, and was
gladdened in his sleep.
TWO MEN OF THE MARNE
(_September 9, 1914_)
It was a little after five in the afternoon of Wednesday, 9th
September, when a general officer with the Ninth French Army rode
with one companion up the road from Sezanne. He had clearly in his
mind on a landscape map the memory of three disastrous days just
past. He saw the line upon that map like a small, vivid picture; he
saw it as it was also in reality--the crushing of his centre back
and back, day after succeeding day, through the Sunday, the Monday,
the Tuesday, and the early hours of this the Wednesday, in which the
crisis had come: the crisis of the Marne.
To the north the ceaseless noise of the guns which had filled those
four days still rolled, and as he heard it he considered the 42nd
Division. It had just arrived behind the gap opening between the
11th and the 9th Corps. To his right, and also to the northward, but
behind the line of the battle, a great storm-cloud was growing to
cover the sky, and beneath it, where it darkened the last brilliance
of that intensely hot day, the sharp edge of the Champagne hills,
the steep down near the marshes of St. Gond, and the strangely
isolated height of the Mont Aimé stood out unnaturally clear, the
latter with the western light of the declining sun full on it against
the ominous livid purple of the thunder-cloud. At its base the
Prussian Guard had stretched out to the limit of their numbers; they
were already too far extended; they were still advancing. Behind
again to the right (he did not know in what confusion, but the
confusion had come) bunched the Saxons.
That vast modern battle was not one in which, as in those of our
fathers’ time, the decisive moment was grasped by the eye, and the
decisive manœuvre conducted upon a field actually seen by the man
deciding it. In that vast modern battle the critical moment was
the end of calculation infinitely complex and stretching back for
days; yet there was, in this moment of the late afternoon, on that
Wednesday, essentially the same process maturing in a length of days
which had with the great Napoleon matured in an hour; and what was
about to be done was essentially the same as what Marlborough had
done at Blenheim, when he drew that heavy phalanx of white-coated
German cavalry from the right, under the heights, and launched it
at the French left centre and decided Blenheim; for the enemy line,
though still advancing, was stretched to its utmost, was breaking:
the gap in the German line had been perceived, and proved fatal to
the Germans.
The general officer returned from his ride a little after six
o’clock. He sat in the room of a private house, which during the last
twenty-four hours had been the conning tower of the fight. He had
the great map before him, scored with rough chalk. He saw through
the tall windows before him the lowering sky. He received minute by
minute the telephone messages, and marked their news in sharp pencil
jabs upon the sheet. The dull noise to the north was the same; the
reports pouring in from the front showed little change, but that
little change was as significant as the slight movement after slack
water in a harbour, when the tide begins to turn.
It was still full daylight; the storm had broken on those northern
hills; there were lightning flashes against the dead cloud, and the
noise of distant thunder mingled with the ceaseless thudding of the
guns. The general ceased his labour and could lean back in his chair,
resting his eyes from the map, and make certain that the thing was
accomplished. An order had been given upon the enemy’s side, and it
was an order for retreat....
The evening fell, the rain drove through darkness, the thunder
lessened, grumbled and withdrew. None slept. All followed the more
distant, the withdrawing signal of the artillery. The reserve troops
came marching through, hurrying to the north. The tide had indeed
turned.
The general officer was mounted again with his few companions and
riding north with the rest through the storm. Before midnight a great
glare was seen on the horizon, blurred with rain. He informed himself
what it was, and heard it was the station of La Fère Champenoise
burning: the enemy had abandoned it three hours before. And still
they went northwards, and still the far noise of the guns retired
before them, miles away.
* * * * *
There is a house in Luxembourg built for a large school and standing
upon the public square opposite the post office. Here was housed,
in that same September of 1914, the Central Command of the German
armies. Hence proceeded the central determining orders which moulded
the battle reaching along one hundred and fifty miles of front, two
hundred miles away.
The little hill-town on its splendid gorge was quiet enough. The
German officers came and went through the streets, courteous, not
ill-liked, among a people whom they had always regarded as one of
their own; no cruelties had marked this violation of what they
thought to be no more than a technical neutrality. The coinage, the
customs, the railways had been German for a lifetime; German speech
was all about them, and the traditions they knew. The afternoon was
fair and warm in Luxembourg, high though the town stands. Here was
all the odd, ironic air of peace, though here was the heart of the
attack and of the enormous war.
Into that great empty building, now filled with its busy groups of
writing and telephoning men, its big, bare deal tables with their
masses of maps pinned down, its walls covered with further maps,
lines in blue and red chalk drawn upon them and numbers hastily
inscribed, came for the first time, after so many days of triumphant
advance, the note of change. There was half an hour of too great
calm, during which decision wrestled against decision and a proud
refusal to accept inevitable things; but the moment came; it was
the reflex of that same moment, a little after five o’clock, when
the thunderstorm had broken far away beyond the reedy belts of the
Marne River. An order had been given at the front: the man upon whose
responsibility it went--a man already broken with illness--rose and
went out uncertainly, as though he were far older than his age,
leaning upon the plain iron rail of the school staircase as he
painfully descended the steps; then slowly, with bent head, wandered
into the neglected court and garden.
Between him and the public square there was but a low wall supporting
high, open rails far apart. He came in his full uniform, this general
officer, who had accepted and ordered the retirement. He was a
nobleman, superior in military talent to his fellows, even amid that
great organization, which was the best designed for war in Europe.
He leaned against the railings a moment with his left hand, his
whole body was bowed, and then he sat him down, careless of dignity,
careless of prestige. He sat down publicly on the low stone wall that
supported the railings, his head bending more and more forward, and
staring on the ground. He bore a name with very different memories
of cold triumph. It was Moltke.
A group of boys playing in the square ceased from play to gaze at
the old boy, timidly approached the railings, and stared at that
poor, broken figure. They could know nothing of the traditions of the
Prussian army, nor of how strange a sight they saw, but they felt its
enormity. He, for his part, had forgotten what was around him--the
place, the children; he stared at the ground, remembering as in a
vivid dream his urgent appeal to his emperor, his agony at defeat,
his intelligence too great for his heart, and the knell still ringing
there: “The campaign has failed.... The campaign has failed.”
THE END
_Biography and Memoirs_
JOHN WANAMAKER
BY HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS
“A correct perspective of the man and his work ... has been admirably
supplied in a new and adequate biography. It may be said at the
outset that the author was not only peculiarly fitted for his task,
he has performed it with distinction. Understanding his subject,
and familiar with the scenes of his business and civic life, he has
written with facility and authority.”--_Philadelphia Public Ledger._
THROUGH MANY WINDOWS
BY HELEN WOODWARD
“Not only the epic of a woman’s battles in New York for her place
in the sun, but it is a study in business psychology, the best, the
raciest and the frankest I have ever read.”--Benjamin de Casseres,
_New York Evening Post_. “Every American ought to read it,” Dorothy
Canfield.
A MUSICIAN AND HIS WIFE
BY MRS. REGINALD DE KOVEN
“The author has lived among the great folk of the world, and has
written in a way to give the reader a glimpse not only of herself and
her illustrious husband but of their times. This we believe is the
ideal autobiographical method and that pursued by autobiographers who
have lived. Mrs. de Koven is a charming raconteur.”--_Musical Leader._
MY LIFE AND TIMES
BY JEROME K. JEROME
Of this fascinating story of the life of the famous author of “The
Passing of the Third Floor Back” and “Three Men in a Boat” Richard Le
Gallienne says: “This very companionable book of memories will the
more endear him to his many friends. It is full of humanity, good
sense and good fun, and it is admirably written with the ease of a
born _causeur_.”
PORTRAITS AND PORTENTS
BY A. G. GARDINER
The distinguished author of “War Lords” and “Priests, Prophets and
Kings” here presents a striking series of pictures of contemporary
celebrities. The editor for nearly twenty years of the _London Daily
News_, A. G. Gardiner has had unusual opportunities for intimate
contacts with leaders of opinion and action, not only in England, but
all over the world.
HARPER & BROTHERS
_Publishers Since 1817_ New York
_Books of Travel_
GIFTS OF FORTUNE
BY H. M. TOMLINSON
Among modern writers of travel books H. M. Tomlinson is preëminent
in the ability to convey the sense of actuality and the thrill of
adventure. With that skill which is peculiarly his own he again
writes of unconventional voyages--in the islands of the East, in the
Malay forests, in the South American jungle and in many other remote
sections of the world.
CONSTANTINOPLE
BY H. G. DWIGHT
“No American has ever better caught the spirit of Turkey than Harry
Dwight. He has a sense of humor and leisure that are altogether
Oriental; and he always writes with charm and distinction.”--_Herbert
Adams Gibbons._
ROYAL SEVILLE
BY E. ALLISON PEERS
“According to Mr. Peers, there is no other place like Seville. And
indeed, unique in its way as Venice, it does intrigue as uniquely.
It is this peculiarly individual appeal that Mr. Peers not only
describes but interprets. He disclaims an attempt or even desire to
write a guidebook of the delectable city, Seville. Rather has he
written desultorily of the magic of its enticement....”--_Boston
Transcript._
TOM-TOM
BY JOHN W. VANDERCOOK
“Wonderful stories of ‘magic’ in the jungles of Raleigh’s ‘El
Dorado’ are told by Mr. John W. Vandercook, author of _Tom-Tom_,
a fascinating account of the habits, the beliefs, and the
jungle-science of the black men who inhabit Suriname--the hinterland
of Dutch Guiana.”--_London Daily Express._
TALES OF THE ANGLER’S EL DORADO--NEW ZEALAND
BY ZANE GREY
“Uniquely remarkable as each fishing adventure seems to the ‘compleat
angler,’ it is really so when its scenes are as little known to us as
antipodal New Zealand. Mr. Grey is not only the creator of the verbal
descriptions of its scenic beauty and its sturdy, progressive people,
but of the photographs illustrating both, full page in the majority
of cases and beyond words beautiful.”--_Boston Transcript._
HARPER & BROTHERS
_Publishers Since 1817_ New York
Transcriber’s Note
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Six misspelled words were corrected.
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