ADRIANOPLE
Among the struggles of the past which seem decisively to have
subverted the old order of things and ushered in the new, is the
battle of Adrianople. There Valens, Emperor of Rome, was killed in
battle with the Goths; and the proud Roman army hitherto deemed
invincible, almost invulnerable, was defeated and destroyed.
How the wild-eyed children of the North must have gazed with
astonishment upon one another as they stood victors on that field!
They had not dared to hope that a Roman army would go down under
their undisciplined assault; and that an Emperor of Rome should
lie dead upon the battlefield was far beyond their wildest dream.
Doubtless they felt within them that first awakening of brutal
youth-strength: race-childhood was gone; race-manhood not yet come.
And enervated old Rome; cultured, wily, effetely civilized Romans
lay at the feet of these youthful, battle-flushed barbarians: and
history yet hears the cries that arose as those feet advanced
ruthlessly trampling.
RIVERS.
If rivers could write history--what would the Nile tell us, the
Tigris-Euphrates, the Granicus-Issus, the Metaurus, the Aufidus,
the Tiber, the Danube, the Moskva, the Maritza?
Mysterious Nile--with sources for ages unknown; with inundations
death-dealing, life-giving; with crocodiles and alligators and
implacable river God: with Theban Karnak-Luxor and the Necropolis;
with Memphis and the Pyramids and the great Sphinx; with dynastic
silences perturbed by a few great names--Menes, Cheops, Rameses;
with the barge of Cleopatra wafted by scent-sick breezes to a
waiting Anthony; with cosmopolitan bad, sad, modern Memphis-Cairo.
Tigris-Euphrates valley--cradle of the human race! home of the
Accadians, a pre-historic people that had passed away and whose
language had become a dead classic tongue when Nineveh and Babylon
were young. Who were the Accadians? Who were the Etruscans? The
Euphrates and the Tiber will not tell.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon--world-wonder: Babylon as described
by Herodotus--city of blood and beauty and winged power: city
surfeited with the slaughter of Assyrian Nineveh: city of
the great temple of Bel: city of palaces guarded by majestic
colossi--Sphinxes, winged lions, man-head bulls; city of gold and
precious stones and ivory edifices and streets of burnished brass:
city of the fatal Euphrates, of Baltshazzar’s banquet and the dread
hand-writing upon the wall: city of a destruction so tremendous, so
terrible that the lamentation thereof, caught vibrantly in Biblical
amber, rings on and ever on adown the ages, “Babylon the great is
fallen, is fallen!”
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter--the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.”
--_Omar Khayyam._
And the site of Babylon, that mighty Paris of the past, is not
now authoritatively known. Does the river know; does it remember
the glory and the horror-night and the gloom? Is the sad sighing
of rivers caused by the sorrows they see as they flow? And is the
eternal moan of ocean the aggregate of the throbs of woe that the
rivers have felt as they flow? Does nature know of mortal woe, does
she, indeed, lament with Moschus the death of pastoral Bion, with
Shelley, the untimely departure of Keats, our “Adonais”?
Fact or fancy, suggestive silence or assertive sound, poet-dream or
cynic-certainty--which draws nearer to truth? which shall prevail?
Granicus-Issus--bloody outlets of the wounds of the world when
Macedonian Alexander made Europe and Asia bleed!
Was Alexander the Great great? Moralize as we may; shudder at the
grim bloody outlets of a wounded world; wonder at the mad folly
of the masses who, at the caprice of a magnetic madman, wildly
slay and submit to be slain; see clearly, in the cut and statuary
past, the dolt unreason of it all, the uselessness, the Pelion-Ossa
horror: yet honestly recognize that deep down in the perverse human
heart there lurks loving admiration for--Alexander the Great.
Rameses, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon--we cannot
dissociate these men from their deeds; how then can we disapprove
their deeds and approve these men? Why is it that a Shelley, Byron,
De Musset, Swinburne, Omar--_ad infinitum_--enthrall us by the
charm of their written words, even tho’ we disagree with them in
their tenets, their philosophy of life, their conclusions: and we
censure and condemn their private lives! Can men, as Catullus sings
to Lesbia, both “adore and scorn” the same object at the same time?
There are many replies to these questions, but no satisfactory
answer. Psychologists, take note.
The military hero, the “chief who in triumph advances”, the
Warrior Bold, the idols of history will continue to glimmer
secure in cob-web fascination even when armaments shall have
been banished from off the face of the earth and wars shall be
remembered only as the myths of days that are no more. We forgive
Granicus-Issus-Arbela for the sake of Alexander the Great.
And the conqueror of the world died, aged thirty-two, in Babylon.
This cognizant old city and Accadian Euphrates were too wearily
wise to wonder two thousand years ago. They had seen the rise and
fall of many monarchs: and one more, this boy-wonder from the West,
could arouse no throb of pitying surprise from scenes that dully
remembered dead and gone dynasties. Why, death was old when Accadia
was young ten thousand years ago; lament this stripling? No. And
thus went out the conquered Conqueror of the world.
The little stream Metaurus witnessed perhaps the most momentous
battle of history. Yet no magic name shines forth from that strife
either as victor or vanquished. Nero, the Roman consul, victor; and
Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal, vanquished; are not the names of
favorites of fame. As Byron says, of a thousand students hearing
the name _Nero_ nine hundred and ninety-nine recall the last
Julian Emperor of Rome, and one laboriously remembers the hero of
Metaurus. And yet were historians endowed with Platonic vision
whereby the great is perceived in the small, doubtless the bloody
conflict by the stream would be seen pivotal of history.
O hopes and fears and blasted dreams of so gigantic scale, played
on a stage of Alpine eminence, no wonder you stand spectacular
thro’ the ages!
“Carthagini jam non ego nuntios
Mittam superbos. Occidit, occidit
Spes omnis et fortuna nostri
Nominis, Hasdrubale interemto.”
--_Horace._
“Alas, I shall not now send to Carthage proud bearers of good
news,” said Hannibal, as he mournfully gazed at the severed head
of his brother, hurled insolently into his camp, even as with
impatient hope he awaited news of that brother’s coming and dreamed
the dream of their successfully united forces, attack on Rome,
victory, and the dispatch of proud messengers to Carthage. With
prophetic gaze did the hero of Cannæ see in that bloodily dead
face the negation of his eight years’ victory in Italy, his recall
to Carthage, his defeat at Zama, his exile and bitter death, and
the onward stride of world-conquering Rome over the ashes of
Carthage.
Cities that have been and that are no more: Niobe-woe: rivers that
know of that long ago and wearily sigh as they flow!
Old Tiber disdains the paragraph; a volume for it or--nothing.
Lordly dark Danube--so long the barrier between the known and the
unknown, civilization and barbarism, the magic sun-gardens of Italy
and the Teutoberger Wald!
“Varus, Varus, give back my legions, Varus”--that cry of Cæsar
Augustus, Ruler of Rome, Mistress of the World, was the first wild
note of a chorus of woe that arose in full diapason when Valens
fell in the battle of Adrianople. From the victory of Arminius over
the Roman troops under Quintilius Varus in the Black Forest of
Germany (A. D. 9) to the decisive victory of the combined Gothic
tribes over the veteran Roman army under Valens near the capital of
the Empire, the sympathetic student of history may hear ever that
losing cry of the Emperor-seer, “Give back my legions, Varus.”
Legend relates that on the Roman northern frontier there stood a
colossal statue of Victory; it looked toward the North, and with
outstretched hand pointing to the Teutoberger Wald, seemed to urge
on to combat and victory: but the night following the massacre of
the Roman troops in the Black Forest, and the consequent suicide of
Varus, this statue did, of its own accord, turn round and face the
South, and with outstretched hand pointing Romeward, seemed to urge
on to combat and victory the wild-eyed children of the North. Thus
did the Goddess of Victory forsake Rome.
The Moskva river is yet memory-lit with the fires of burning
Moscow; and its murmuring ever yet faintly echoes the toll,
toll, toll of the Kremlin bell. Three days and three nights of
conflagration--and then the charred and crumbling stillness! Snow
on the hills and on the plains; white, peaceful snow healing the
wounds of Borodino, blanketing uncouth forms, hiding the horror;
but within the fated city, no snow, nothing white, nothing
peaceful; gaunt icicle-blackness o’er huge, prostrate Pan-Slavism.
Yet surely cognizant old Moscow, secure in ruins, sighed, too,
o’er the gay and gallant Frenchmen caught fatefully in the trap of
desolation. Perhaps, too, the compensating lamentation of distant
Berezina mingled genially with the murmuring Moskva.
Little Nap Bonaparte met his Waterloo in Moscow: history to the
contrary notwithstanding.
“The soldiers fight and the kings are called heroes,” says the
Talmud. Of all that nameless host of ardent, life-loving men
who entered Moscow, stood aghast amid the ruins, started back
on that awful across-Continent retreat--the world knows only
Napoleon, history poses Napoleon, Meissonier paints Napoleon, Byron
apostrophizes Napoleon, Emerson eulogizes Napoleon, Rachmaninoff
plays Napoleon, and the hero-lover loves Napoleon. Why? Is there
any answer to ten thousand Whys perched prominently and grinning
insolently in this mad play-house of the Planets? None.
“What hope of answer or redress
Beyond the veil, beyond the veil!
* * * * *
And yet we somehow trust that good
Will be the final goal of ill,
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
* * * * *
The Maritza river, at one time called the Orestes river, is formed
by the confluence of two unimportant streams. Adrianople is
favorably situated, and ranks next to Constantinople in natural
advantages.
Orestes, son of Agamemnon, built the city and gave his name both
to the city and the principal river. Emperor Hadrian changed the
name to Hadrianopolis (Hadrian’s city), thence our modernized
Adrianople. One almost regrets that the name of the restless
Orestes did not continue appropriately to designate the city of so
varying fortunes and vivid vicissitudes.
Adrianople was the Turkish capital for nearly a hundred years;
it was abandoned in 1453 when Constantinople came into Turkish
control. The ruins of the palaces of the Sultans yet grace the
ancient capital.
Adrianople is the faithful Moslem city of forty mosques. The mosque
Selim II. is a close rival to Santa Sofia.
Greek and Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine, Christian and Moslem,
Turk and Bulgarian, influences have in turn dominated the city of
three rivers; each re-baptizing it with blood: and the end is not
yet.
In 1713, Charles XII. of Sweden was a guest in the castle of
Tumurtish. Little then did the valiant Madman of the North dream
how ignominiously his own meteoric career would close: little did
he see himself as fixed in fame, not by his combats and victories,
not even by his gallant defeat at Pultowa, but by being the
inspiration in the moralizing mind of Dr. Samuel Johnson of the
following lines:
“He left a name--at which the world grew pale--
To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
The Vanity of Human Wishes is indeed exemplified not only in
Charles XII. of Sweden, but also in many other favorites of
fortune: not one of whom, perhaps, but would add to or alter his
own peculiar setting in fame--if perchance he should be able to
recognize himself at all in the historic figure masquerading under
his name. How seldom does it chance that the world honors a man for
what that man feels to be his best title to honor?
Would Julius Cæsar, red-hand conqueror of Gaul, know himself as the
Shakespearean hero? And Nero, Louis XI., Wallenstein, Henry VIII.,
Roderick Borgia--would they claim even passing acquaintance with
themselves as fame has fixed them? If these men took any of their
fighting qualities with them into the Spirit Land, there must have
been some flamy duelling when they met their respective biographers.
And so the blood of battle bathed Adrianople one thousand five
hundred and thirty-five years ago and--last year (1913). And we
talk learnedly about the defeat and death of the Roman Emperor
Valens, and of the effect of that victory upon our respected
barbarian ancestors with consequent doings of destiny, etc.,
etc.--because we _don’t know_: and we say little about the
Servian-Bulgarian-Turkish capture of Adrianople last year, because
it is too near and--_we know_. Then, too, who can poetize or
moralize or even sentimentally scribble over the yet hideously
bleeding wounds of war? When they are healed, when the moaning is
still, the mangled forms moveless, the cripples on crutches gone,
the lamentations silenced, the last-lingering heartache soothed in
Death--why, then, perhaps; but not now. Battle in the real is a
human butchering: and there is no other delusion under the sun more
diabolically sardonic than that which makes animal savagery seem
patriotism and the red-hand slaughter-man a hero. From the Homeric
Hector-Achilles, deliver the world, O Lord.
Strange, indeed, is the contrariety between the real of War and the
ideal, the far away hero and the near Huerta, the blood spilled and
stilled and the bright life-blood spilling, the sorrow silenced and
the agonized cries that arise, the battle of Adrianople, 378 A. D.,
and the siege and capture and re-capture of Adrianople (1912-1913).