A FIELD OF SLAUGHTER, AND A FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.
So the flood of destruction was turned aside from Troyes, and swept on to
the deadly encounter with the armies of Rome and her allies, under the
command of Aetius the great Roman general, and Theodoric the Gothic king,
in the Catalaunian plains near Châlons.
The great shock of the battle of the nations (the Hunnenschlacht) came at
last.
It was said that before the battle, Attila had a solemn consultation
in his tent with his augurs, and by various methods of divination they
warned him of disaster, but said that a great leader of his foes would
fall on the field; and that Attila, believing that this leader must be
Aetius, deemed that the loss of thousands would be compensated by the
death of that one. Probably personal resentment also may have entered
into his dislike of Aetius, once a hostage among the Huns, and afterwards
their ally.
But whether the battle was forced on him or chosen by him, and how it
began, none seem able to say. The confusion that hangs about the story
of great battles does not begin with gunpowder; blood, and fire, and
vapour of smoke, and the dust of the arena hang in blinding clouds around
them all. And this conflict on the plains between Troyes and Châlons was
one of the great critical battles of the world. A little shallow runnel
of water, it was said, became a great torrent of blood on that fatal
field. Three hundred thousand were left there dead. “A battle ruthless,
manifold, immense, obstinate,” fought on from the afternoon into the
night. In the morning after it the Romans and the Gothic allies, left in
possession of the field, strewn with corpses, saw that the Huns did not
return to the fight, but kept encamped behind their wagons, where they
had fled for shelter. This was all the proof they had of victory. The
battle was scarcely won; but the Huns were gone, and they were suffered
to go unpursued. Gone as it proved for ever; from Gaul and all Teutonic
Europe. But of that no man then could be sure.
Marius wrote on the morrow of the battle—“The messengers are to start
for Rome at once. Fortunately only my left hand is wounded, and that but
slightly, and so I can write. The battle is won; or at least it is over.
The battle-field and the dead are left to us. The Huns are behind their
wagons. Theodoric, the brave old Gothic king, is slain. Some say Attila
would have been content to lose the battle if Aetius had fallen, as he
thought the augurs promised. But Aetius lives and diplomatizes still.
And the heroic old Goth is dead—a hero and king to the last. Unmindful
of his threescore years, I saw him galloping to and fro, cheering on his
people to the fight, when he was thrown from his horse, and fell under
the feet of the advancing horsemen. They are searching now for his body
among the heaps of slain who died around their king.
“They say Attila in leading on his hosts bade them despise our Roman
forces with the ancient defensive array of the shields locked into the
testudo, and make their onset on the young nations who could not only
defend themselves but assail. ‘Cut the sinew and the limbs will relax,’
he cried. ‘Him who is fated to conquer no dart will touch; him who is
doomed to die Fate will find amidst the sloth of peace.’ He might have
spared his taunts to us Romans. Romans or barbarians, who could say who
fought best when all fought with the hope of beating back the flood of
destruction for ever, and with the certainty that if it were not beaten
back, it would overwhelm them all? It was no conflict between machines
and battering-rams and Roman walls, but between flesh and blood, fierce
and desperate men fighting hand to hand for life or death. They say three
hundred thousand lives were lost upon this fatal field; three hundred
thousand souls there passed away—whence or whither, who can say? Every
kind of weapon was there—javelin, spear, huge Tartar bow, Roman shield
and sword; amidst the din of every kind of language. Never, I should
think, could confusion have been greater; and to confusion of tongues,
before the battle ended, was added the bewilderment of darkness. We began
at three o’clock, and the conflict raged on through the night. Aetius
himself strayed in the dark amongst the Huns, whose language, fortunately
for him, he knew. And yet, in spite of the confusion of tribes and
tongues, the issue is clear, clearer I think than the issue of battles
can often be. For it is, at bottom, the conflict of civilization with
barbarism, of hope with despair, of building with destroying, of order
with anarchy, of heathenism with Christianity, of life with death; and in
the main, civilization, order, hope, Christianity, life, have won the day.
“At this moment I hear the death-wail of the Goths around the body of
their king. They think they have rescued the royal corpse from the heap
of slain beneath which it lay.
“Still the Huns keep behind their wagons. Attila their king is among
them; but around him there is no shout as for a king.
“The field is won; the host of the Huns, the great flood of devastation,
is ebbing back to its deserts. God grant it be for ever.
“It seems decided that we make no pursuit, but let the flood ebb away
beyond the Rhone. To-morrow I go southward with a detachment to Troyes.
Farewell.”
* * * * *
All the day of the great battle tidings kept flowing in to Troyes. None
ventured beyond the city, for the battle was said to be raging not more
than five miles away. There was indeed no roll of the thunder of guns;
but the echo of distant tumult came faintly now and then through the
hush of the July afternoon.
Troyes knew that her Bishop was there. Who could say that if the battle
were lost, vengeance might not fall on his head? But if Attila won, _all_
was lost.
All day prayer went up ceaselessly in the churches, but mostly in
silence, or following the low litanies of the choir, so heavy was the
weight of suspense.
A confusion of contradictory rumours reached the city: first it was
reported that the Romans had won the height on which all might depend;
then that Theodoric the great King of the Visigoths was slain. After
that fell the darkness. And through the night people took refuge in the
churches, and silent prayer went up; until at last, in the quiet dawn of
the July morning, came the news that the battle was over, that Attila
and his Huns had fled behind their wagons, and that the Roman army held
the field. Soon came the further news that Attila and his host were
retreating towards the Rhone, carrying Bishop Lupus with them. The city
and the land were saved from the destroyer, but who could answer for the
saintly life so freely offered up for the people?
To Ethne and Baithene the city, in a sense they themselves, seemed
orphaned afresh; and in their different ways and words, the little group
of four, Irish and Hebrew, poured out their hearts together for the
prophet still in the den of lions.
There was much to be done for the crippled and wounded who were borne
in from time to time from the battle. Baithene went out with the wagons
to carry them in; Ethne was again among the deaconesses and consecrated
virgins, succouring the wounded.
Late in the evening Baithene came with a cart to the door of the house
where Eleazar was sojourning; he asked to be allowed to bring in a young
Roman officer who had recognized him. True to the hospitality of their
race and their religion, Eleazar and Miriam would not refuse. Was not
Abraham, “the father of the faithful,” also the “father of guests”? Had
he not received the heathen stranger into his house? yet had not the
Almighty been more merciful than Abraham, rebuking the patriarch for not
tolerating the imperfect worship of his heathen guest? The Romans had
indeed destroyed Jerusalem, but this wounded Roman must be welcomed as a
guest from God, and the guest-chamber was made ready for him.
The stranger was Marius, whose wounds were more severe than he had chosen
to report in his letters to his family.
For the first day he lay quite still, weak from loss of blood; but
Miriam’s homely skill in nursing and preparing food for the sick proved
of good service, and on the third morning he was able to creep out with
Baithene and Ethne to the church. On the way they told him of the rescue
of Troyes from the plunder of Attila’s host through the intercession of
Lupus, and how the aged Bishop had given himself up to the Huns for his
people.
By degrees the whole story of the Irish captives became clear to him: the
baptism by Patrick, the father’s rank as a chieftain among his people,
their capture by British pirates, their hearing of the letter of Patrick
to Coroticus, their purchase by Eleazar the Jew, their interview with the
friendly monk at Tours, and his letters to Bishop Anianus of Orleans and
Bishop Lupus of Troyes.
His heart went out to them as captive nobles, in their own land of a
house as ancient as his own; as in unjust bondage to a Hebrew, yet so far
legally his, that except legally they could not be set free; and above
all as Christians, Catholic Christians of the old faith, yet in some way
of the old faith in a new way, so fervent, and simple, and unaware of all
the controversies that had for many worn its poetry into prose; glowing
with a Christian faith that seemed in some unspeakable way steeped anew
in the freshness of dawn, baptized into the death and life of Christ the
Lord. So, during those days in the house together, the sweet household
way and gracious services of Ethne stole into his inmost heart and took
possession of it before he was aware. She was like his mother, yet
unlike, as the rose of dawn to the tender glow of evening.
At last the day came when Marius had to leave with his detachment. The
day before he left he was trying to console Ethne for the loss of Bishop
Lupus.
“He is not lost,” she said, with a triumphant smile in her dark-grey
eyes. “Attila will not harm him.”
“Your heart has room even for the Hun,” he replied, remembering his
first sight of her beside the dying boy at Orleans.
“The Huns are terrible heathen, I fear,” she said, “but they do seem to
know the saints of God when they see them. At least they are not what
Patrick calls apostate Christians.”
“No,” he replied, very gravely. “Attila does seem to recognize a saint;
and, alas! he has seen so many apostate or unworthy Christians. Think
of Chrysaphius, the minister of the Emperor of the East, trying to
bribe Attila’s own ambassadors and friends, and to assassinate him
treacherously; and think of Attila finding it out, yet, when the embassy
charged with the base project came to him in his camp beyond the Danube,
being magnanimous enough to distinguish between the villains who planned
the treachery, and the envoys who were sent to carry it out without
knowing what they were doing. It was not like an ordinary savage to let
one of that embassy escape.”
Ethne sighed.
“How indeed was Attila to know that to be a Christian means to love good
and hate evil? The Huns are not devils; for the devils did wrong when
they knew what they were doing. And how were the Huns to know? And even
if they were devils,” she added, “Patrick has taught us the Name before
which the devils fly.”
“In the Creed?” he said.
“In the Creed,” she replied, “and in Patrick’s own hymn.”
“What is Patrick’s hymn?” he asked.
“I thought all Christians knew Patrick’s hymn,” she said, with some
surprise, and she began to chant softly some of her beloved Irish lorica
and “breastplate.”
“But I do not know your language,” he said.
Ethne translated—“‘Christ at my right hand, at my left; Christ in the
fort, in the battle, on the sea; by the way, at the end.’ Is it not sure
to be so with all Christians? Is it not sure to be so with the holy
Bishop Lupus?”
He hesitated a moment, and then said—
“Christ our Lord suffers some very hard things to happen to His
Christians.”
“I know. We were told so,” she answered. “He said so. But the hymn says
He is with us on all the ways, however rough; and certainly always at the
end, however dark.”
He was silent. Her faith and hope were stealing like sunshine into his
heart, but, like the sunshine, silently.
“I am going with my soldiers,” he said, after a pause, “to keep them
from oppressing the poor peasants. The Huns have robbed them of nearly
everything, and an army of hungry men following the Huns must not be
suffered to take the little that is left.”
“I know,” she said, with a flash of quick sympathy; “the Huns are not
the only robbers. The people seem to suffer everywhere, from every one.
Baithene has heard them say the misery was there long before the Huns
came. There are the tax-gatherers and the slave-masters everywhere.”
“Everywhere,” Marius replied, “and always.”
“And you will help the oppressed and save them from the oppressors?” she
said, her whole face lighting up, the royal heart going forth to the poor
and the down-trodden.
“I will try,” he said; “I am going back to Rome.”
“They are taking us there also,” she said; and she parted from him with a
smile which was to him as an illumination from heaven.
He wrote to his sister—“The wound was worse than I knew. But I have had
tender care and nursing in the house of a Jew called Eleazar, from his
wife Miriam, and from two young Christian captives, and I am quite strong
again. And, beloved, I think I have found the Fountain of Youth at last;
and I hope may bring some drops to thee also. Tell my mother of these two
young Christian captives, son and daughter of a king or chieftain from
the farthest West, the Scottish-land, Hibernia, the island Rome never
conquered. They were kidnapped by British pirates, and bought by Eleazar,
an aged Jew, who with his wife Miriam lives at Rome, and is taking them
thither. They must be ransomed. Farewell.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]