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.