Part 2
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.