Chapter XI

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.”