Edward Hutton

“ It was there our religion, the soul of Europe, was born and little by little became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were there conceived, and with such force that while we endure they [Pg 5] can never die. In truth, the Empire which it had taken more than a millennium to build was the most successful and perhaps the most beneficent experiment in universal government that has ever been made. ”

“ Having failed to destroy the Eastern Empire, having failed in his attack upon the western provinces, the only thing that remained for Attila to attempt was the destruction and rape of the soul of all, the citadel of civilisation, Italy and Rome. It was the hardest task of all, therefore in his prudence, and he was always prudent, he had not tried it till now. It was his last throw. It was to fail, and that so contemptibly that his campaigns East and [Pg 131] West in comparison seem like triumphs. ”

“ It has been the point around which the destinies of the Gauls have so often been decided—one has only to recall the most famous instance of all, the deliverance under Joan of Arc—that it is without surprise we see it fulfilling its rôle in the time of Attila also. From time immemorial, before the beginning of history, it had been an important commercial city, for it stood not only on one of the greatest and most fruitful rivers of western Europe, but, as I have said, upon the marches of the north and south, whose gate it was. No one could pass without its leave, at least in safety. ”

“ His mission was wholly successful; but the time spent in showing the Visigoths where their interests lay was to cost Orleans dear. The devoted city wholly surrounded and every day submitted to the assaults and the clouds of arrows of the Huns, hearing no news of any relief, was in despair. In vain the Bishop Anianus went in procession through the streets, and even among the troops on the ramparts, bearing the relics of his church; they called him traitor. Still firm in his faith in God and in the promise of Aetius, daily he made men climb the last high tower in expectation of deliverance. ”

“ No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation in virtue of which they still live in historic tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again dare even to look askance at a German. ”

“ It was not till the two brothers Attila and Bleda ascended the Hunnish throne, if throne it can be called, in the year 423, that the Huns really became immediately and directly dangerous to civilisation.
That civilisation already half bankrupt and in transition had, as we have seen, been bewildered and wounded by the actual incursion of Barbarian armies south of the Danube and the Rhine, nay within the heart of the Empire, within reach of Constantinople, within the very walls of Rome. It was now to be assaulted by a savage horde, wholly heathen, intent on murder and rape, loot and destruction. ”

“ Before the winter was over, the winter of 451-452, Attila was already moving south-west out of Barbary over the Danube, and at last by the great Roman road through Pannonia, crossing the Julian Alps as Alaric had done before him to cross the Isonzo, to lay siege to the first great Italian fortress, then perhaps, save Ravenna, the strongest place in all Italy, Aquileia, the capital of the province of Venetia. ”

“ This advice Thorismund followed without seeing the duplicity of Aetius.” Such an explanation of the treason of the Goths was doubtless accepted by the Gothic traditions and especially comfortable to Jornandes. It is incredible, because any observer could see that Attila was not so badly beaten that he was not a far greater danger to the Empire than ever the Visigoths could be. To let him escape, and that is what the departure of Thorismund meant, was treason, not to the Goths, but to the Empire. ”

“ The Empire was confined on the west by the ocean, on the south by the desert of Africa, on the east by the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, on the north by the Rhine and the Danube, the Black Sea and the Caucasus.
It was that northern frontier which was a fundamental weakness and which at least from the middle of the third century continually occupied the mind of the Roman administration. How to hold it?
Beyond that frontier lay a world largely unknown, a mere wilderness of barbarians, tribes
always restless, always at war, always pressing upon the confines of civilisation. ”

“ The Huns began to magnify the power of Attila,—was not his work around them? The Romans knowing the contents of the letter they bore sang the praises of the Emperor. Suddenly Vigilas, perhaps already drunk, asserted that it was not right to compare men with the gods, nor Attila with Theodosius, since Attila was but a man. Only the intervention of Maximin and Priscus prevented bloodshed, nor was harmony restored till Orestes and Edecon had received presents of silk and jewels. ”

“ Attila hearing of it when Constantius was beyond his reach claimed the booty as his own. It was upon this miserable business that Valentinian had sent an embassy to Attila from Ravenna.
It is certainly a shameful and an amazing spectacle we have here. In that little village of Barbary the ambassadors of the Emperors, East and West, of the Courts of Constantinople and Ravenna, of New Rome and of Old, wait in a marsh the passage of a savage that they may be allowed to follow in his train and humbly seek an audience. ”

“ He played with his victims as a cat does with a mouse and would always rather buy a victory than win it. He found his threat more potent than his deed, and in fact played with the Empire which had so much to lose, very much as Bismarck played with Europe. Like Bismarck too his business was the creation of an Empire. His idea, an idea that perhaps even Roua had not failed to understand, was the creation of an Empire of the North, a Hunnish Empire, in counterpoise against the Roman Empire of the South, to the south that is of the Rhine and the Danube. ”

“ Gaul was more easily attacked than Italy and was little less essential to the future of Roman civilisation. It was then, as it has been ever since, the very heart of Europe. To destroy it was to destroy the future.
Gathering his innumerable peoples upon the borders of the Danube, Attila divided his armies into two parts. The first army was to march to the Rhine by the right or southern bank of the Danube, by the great Roman military way, past all the Roman fortresses of the frontier of the Empire, each of which was to be destroyed as it advanced. ”

“ The Gothic chronicler Jornandes, writing a hundred years after the events he describes, wholly or almost wholly at the mercy of a Gothic and so a Barbarian legend, would seem, though poorly informed as to facts and details, to be fully justified in the general impression he gives of the horror and disaster which befell the Hunnish host. It is certain that Attila’s withdrawal of his army must have been not only difficult but impossible without disaster: too many and too brutal crimes had been committed for the ruined population of northern Gaul to permit it an easy passage in retreat. ”

“ Ignorant of the laws they had sworn to keep, as well as of the obligations and privileges of civilisation, the Goths were at the mercy of their masters, who exploited them without scruple, till driven to madness they revolted and began the fatal march through Moesia, entering Thrace at last not as the guests of the Empire but as its victorious enemy. ”

“ While they are forming, before they have locked their shields into the testudo, charge and strike, advance upon the Alans and press back the Visigoths. Here it is we should look for speedy victory. If the nerves are cut the members fail and a body cannot support itself upright when the bones are dragged out of it. Lift up your hearts and show your wonted courage, quit you like Huns and prove the valour of your arms, let the wounded not rest till he has killed his enemy, let him who remains untouched steep himself in slaughter. ”

“ Suddenly the whole country was changed, everywhere the peoples sprang to arms, the noble and the peasant, the bourgeois of the cities, the bond and the free. From Armorica came an heroic company, the Ripuarian Franks and the Salian Franks having seen the ruin of the Roman cities of the country they had been permitted to occupy, the Burgundians also returned to, if they had indeed ever left, their old allegiance. So successful at last was the diplomacy of Rome that when even Sangibanus appeared Aetius feigned to be ignorant of his treason. ”

“ It is certain that nothing can touch him who is fated to live, while he will die even without war who will surely die. And wherefore should fortune have made the Huns the vanquishers of so many nations if it were not to prepare them for this supreme battle? ”

“ Teutonic Germany has accepted Prussia as its sovereign, and no one can question her right to do so; but being what she is, she has been led astray by an anthropological error. Not content with subordinating herself to these Finno-Slavs the real Germany has adopted their hatred and worked out the brutal instincts of these strangers whose iron yoke she has placed upon her nobler spirit. ”

“ Priscus at last asked the stranger how he was come to be amongst the Barbarians. “Why do you ask [Pg 64] me?” answered the unknown. “Because you speak Greek like a native,” answered Priscus. But the stranger only laughed. “Indeed,” said he, “I am Greek. I came for the sake of business to Viminacium on the Danube in Moesia, and there I lived many years and married a rich wife. But when the Huns stormed the city I lost all my fortune and became the slave of this Onegesius whom you are waiting to see. For it is the custom of the Huns to give the richest to their princes. ”

“ None came, no sign of the armies of Aetius could be discerned. Day after day the mighty roads southward lay in the sun white and empty of all life. At last he sent by stealth a messenger to Aetius with this message: “My son, if you come not to-day it will be too late.” That messenger never returned. Anianus himself began to doubt and at last heard counsels of surrender almost without a protest; indeed consented himself [Pg 107] to treat with the Huns. But Attila was beside himself at the length of the resistance, he would grant no terms. Nothing remained but death or worse than death. ”

“ Why had Aetius not marched out of Italy at the head of his armies months before? why had he waited till all the North was a ruin before he carried the eagles over the Alps and confronted this savage and his hordes with the ordered ranks of the army of civilisation? The answer may be found in the war we are fighting to-day against a similar foe. The French failed to [Pg 102] defend the North against the modern Attila because they were too long uncertain which way he would come and where he would strike hardest. ”

“ Within lay all that is worth having in our lives, the hope of the world. It was this which, then as now, had to be defended and against the same enemy—barbarism. For barbarism does not become less barbarous when it becomes learned, a savage is a savage even in professorial dress. For this cause it is written: change your hearts and not your garments.
The defence, then, of the frontier had been [Pg 7] the chief problem of the Empire perhaps from its foundation by Augustus and certainly for two hundred years before Alaric crossed the Alps. ”

“ In that year and the next he destroyed two Roman armies, took and pillaged some seventy towns, and pushed south as far as Thermopylae, and eastward even to Gallipoli; only the walls of Constantinople saved the capital. Theodosius was forced to buy a disgraceful peace at the price of an immediate payment of 6000 pounds’ weight of gold, an annual tribute, no longer even disguised, of 2000 pounds, and an undertaking that the Empire would never employ or give refuge to any of those whom Attila claimed as his subjects. ”

“ He had altogether delivered himself into Attila’s hands. Leaving Maximin and his embassy to make their way back to Constantinople Vigilas went on into Barbary, intent on the assassination of Attila, and had no sooner set foot in the Hunnish capital than he was seized, his baggage opened and the gold discovered. When asked to explain these riches, he answered that they were for his own use and that of his entourage, and that he proposed to ransom the Roman captives and to purchase horses, skins and embroideries. “Evil beast,” shouted Attila, “thou liest, but thy lies deceive none.” ”

“ Even the apostate stranger is moved at last. There in the Hunnish land at dawn one morning, carried back by the eloquence of Priscus to all he had lost, he weeps and exclaims: “The law of the Romans is good; their Republic nobly ordered, but evil magistrates have corrupted it.” He might have said more but that just then a servant of Onegesius appeared and Priscus left him never to see him again.
In instructing Maximin especially to negotiate with Onegesius, Theodosius and Chrysaphius doubtless hoped to win this man by diplomacy as they thought they had won Edecon, by corruption. ”