Palisade

“ For some hours the conflict raged, fifty of the defenders at each intrenchment thrusting down with their long spears the assailants as they strove to scale the bank, while the other fifty rained arrows and javelins upon them; and whenever they succeeded in getting up to the palisade through the circle of the spears, threw down their bows and opposed them sword in hand. Again and again the Romans were repulsed with great slaughter, the cries of exultation from the women who lined the upper intrenchment rose loud and shrill. ”

“ I said. “I will but run to the fort for sword and musket——”
“No need,” he answered. “There are the dead whom you may rob.” The noise increasing as he spoke, we made no further tarrying, but, leaving behind us house and garden, hurried to the palisade.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
In which I go upon a Quest THROUGH a loophole in the gate of the palisade I looked, and saw the sandy neck joining the town to the main, and the deep and dark woods beyond, the fairy mantle giving invisibility to a host. ”

“ Yea, I will make many people amazed at thee, and their kings shall be horribly afraid for thee, when I shall brandish My Sword before them; and they shall tremble at every moment, every man for his own life, in the day of thy fall.—Yea, He will make many nations to marvel at Christendom's fall; and their rulers shall fear and quake on account of her destruction, when they are threatened with destruction by anarchy. Every moment shall every man of them tremble for his life. ”

“ What religious rag has with unholy violence demolished those temples and disturbed fervent but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties. What merciless enemy has thus spread the horrors of fire an sword? ”

“ But the decree was gone forth from a mightier throne. During the latter days of the siege, a hostility to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.
Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigor; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every terror and evil that could beset human nature, but pestilence ”

“ Our Father, thou knowest that we do not pray for the triumph of German arms; we pray for the destruction of the power that has wasted the world, for the despoiling of the ruthless despoiler, for the toppling of the last crown of autocracy, and that the last throne of militarism shall be tumbled down. But, our Father, as we pray for our own who suffer, for our wounded brethren, for our dying comrades, for our widowed and our orphaned and our bereft, we pray for the sufferers of the enemy. ”

“ A universal outcry of wrath and triumph followed this allusion to the national vengeance.
“Ho!” exclaimed the figure. “Men of Israel, hear the words of wisdom. The burden of Rome. By the swords of the mighty will I cause her multitude to fall; the terrible and the strong shall be on thee, city of the idolater; they shall hew off thy cuirasses as the hewer of wood, and of thy shields they shall make vessels of water. There shall be fire in thy palaces, and the sword. ”

“ And fire is gone out of a rod of her branches, which hath devoured her fruit, so that she hath no strong rod to be a sceptre to rule. This is a lamentation, and shall be for a lamentation.—The savage application in the world-wide war of the rod of the Divine authority of rulers will cause revolt, revolution and anarchy to spring up, like a fire, which will bring to an utter end the denominational clusters, the fruit of the vine of the earth. ”

“ And thus in fighting field and forest glen, A man to savage beasts, a savage seemed to men. From Persia now she comes, with all her skill The Christians to resist, though oft has she Strewed with their blood the field, till scarce a rill Remained, that ran not purple to the sea. Here now arrived, the dreadful pageantry Of death presents itself,—the crowd—the pyre— And the bound pair; solicitous to see, And know what crime condemns them to the fire, Forward she spurs her steed and hastens to inquire. ”

“ These grateful off'rings on my grave bestow;
Nor league, nor love, the hostile nations know!
Now, and from hence, in ev'ry future age,
When rage excites your arms, and strength supplies the rage
Rise some avenger of our Libyan blood,
With fire and sword pursue the perjur'd brood ”

“ The Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, too, will be in the hands of consecrated ones, seemingly but not actually cruel, skilled through Divine power to use it with telling effect.
21:32. Thou shalt be for fuel to the fire; thy blood shall be in the midst of the land; thou shalt be no more remembered: for I the Lord have spoken it.—Institutions Divinely condemned shall be as fuel for the fires of bloody anarchy and pass into oblivion. The war is the melting-pot of ecclesiasticism. ”

“ Does such an one as you march in the ranks of rebels? Does a minister of the Gospel preach war, and that against the Lord’s anointed?”
“Against the person of the King we do not war: we fight against his false and dangerous friends. The sword of the Lord is with us, and it must go through the land; but we march as mourners to the field of blood. ”

“ Has no one informed you that if it should please the leader of the barbarians to change his blockade into an assault, it is more than probable that we should be unable to repulse him successfully? Are you still deaf to our deliberations, when your palace may to-morrow be burnt over your head, when we may be staved to death, when we may be doomed to eternal dishonour by being driven to conclude a peace? ”

“ If secret plot of greed or fear Shall bid the trumpets cease, And bind the lands they held so dear To base dishonored peace, How shall their white battalions rest Or sheathe the sword of light,— The unbroken armies of our dead, Who have not ceased to fight! ”

“ These last, on viewing their desolated lands, their defenceless cities, and their dwellings destroyed by fire, exclaimed with bitterness and truth, “Our fellow Christians and self-styled allies found us at peace, they have left us at WAR. They are like those ominous birds of passage whose appearance portends the coming tempest.” ”

“ Those that came to fight with the Chaldeans, to beat them off from the siege, did more hurt than good, provoked the enemy to be more fierce and furious in their assaults, so that the houses in Jerusalem were filled with the dead bodies of men, who died of the wounds they received in sallying out upon the besiegers. God says that they were such as he had slain in his anger, for the enemies' sword was his sword and their anger his anger. ”

“ What they would have done next, if they had been permitted to press forward through the breach, can only be imagined. For a moment it looked as if beneath that spire which idly pointed these men toward a better country, whence rage and hatred and all evil passions are shut out, and beneath the bell, whose function was to send vibrating through the tremulous air its summons to the temple of the Prince of Peace, there might be a hand-to-hand encounter, in which priest and people should assail each other with furious violence. ”

“ And after the lost battle He brought the victor in hot haste [Pg 318] against the "Mother" of the fallen warriors, the ill-fated city, Jerusalem, to wreak vengeance upon her for her ill-timed opposition. But, for all this bitter fruit of their evil doings, the people "turned not back from their own ways"; and therefore the strophe of lamentation closes with a threat of utter extermination: "Their remnant"—the poor survival of these fierce storms—"Their remnant will I give to the sword before their foes." ”

“ Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, wherewith ye fight against the king of Babylon, and against the Chaldeans, which besiege you without the walls, and I will assemble them into the midst of this city.
5 And I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath.
6 And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast: they shall die of a great pestilence. ”

“ Otherwise, beware lest your neighbor’s son be wheedled at any moment into the militia or the standing army or the navy—ready to be consecrated, sanctified, blessed,—for wholesale assassination, ready as a militiaman, as a Cossack, as a soldier, to stain his consecrated sword with the blood of his neighbors and brutally—patriotically—laugh at the tears of women and children. ”

“ Among the characteristic, remarkable, and peculiarly Christian institutions of the middle age, we ought especially to mention that ecclesiastical truce, or peace of God, which towards the commencement of the eleventh century, opposed a powerful barrier to the growing and restless spirit of private warfare. ”

“ But thousands of our people have fallen by the sword who might not have fallen if you had not neglected us, but had instead sent support.
We want to know why you've neglected us for so long. Can you just sit upon your thrones in a thoughtless stupor while your enemies are spreading the work of death around you, murdering thousands of your brethren? You might have saved thousands who looked to you for protection, who trusted you to support them by sending armies. ”

“ It is as if they [85] could not, even for one evening, forget the struggle for existence, and as if they regarded a dinner or a dance as an engagement with the enemy; a brisk assault to carry by storm some place that has long stood a regular siege—a lively skirmish in which everything that comes to hand is a weapon for either attack or self-defence. ”

“ A, God’s judgments according to their deserts, and our Saviour’s prophecy overtook them: for the Romans with a great army besieg’d, plunder’d, and burnt the city and temple. There perish'd by famine, fire, sword and quarrels, 110000 people; the siege beginning at the time of the passover, in a manner when all the Jews in Palastine were enclosed in that city, so that there were in it more strangers than inhabitants. ”

“ In addition to the terrors of the Roman sword, this devoted nation was exposed to famine, pestilence, and the implacable fury of contending parties among themselves, which all conspired together to make the siege of Jerusalem surpass, in horror, every account of any other siege in the records of the world. ”

“ With smoke by day, and fire by night, the power
Of Kings and Priests, those dark conspirators,
He called; they knew his cause their own, and swore
Like wolves and serpents to their mutual wars
Strange truce, with many a rite which Earth and Heaven abhors. ”

“ The horror of the battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal to {186} make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure—these are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and effect, sin and judgment. ”

“ The carnage of battle is merciful compared with it. Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing from knives already dripping with human blood; frantic mothers shielding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead.
The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most awful and despairing in the world's history. It was centuries of cruelty crowded into a few hours. ”

“ Have we not the right to strike as we are struck?—yes, to strike in silence and in darkness. May we not return them wound for wound, and death for death? Would the Catholics hesitate to lay traps for us and massacre us? ”

“ Rest assured that he will find some means to avert bloodshed and yet preserve his See and the empire."
"War is inevitable!"
"Obey the Pope and trust in God. Beware how you take upon yourself to plunge the nation in war—to tear down the sacred barriers of peace—and open the floodgates for a thousand evil passions to deluge Germany with crime and blood! Can you foresee what may occur—what a month may develop—what new political combination the master mind of Gregory may devise for our preservation?" ”

“ And just as men pull down the pretty houses on the outskirts of a fortified city when a siege is impending, in order that they may afford no cover to the enemy, so we have to sweep away a great deal in our lives that is innocent and fair, in order that the foes of our spirit may find no lodgment there. ”

“ In the Middle Ages, the stranger could wander from castle to castle with as little danger as the nature of the country permitted; even in times of war, the blind, the young, the sick, and the clergy were privileged from outrage, though found on hostile territory. And in war, peace, or truce, the pilgrim's shallop was a passport through Christendom; he was under the special protection of the Pope, and to thwart his pious designs was to incur excommunication. ”

“ Unless I see some exceptional opportunity, I do not think I shall lead them out beyond the walls again. The time will come, as the siege goes on, when you will need a body of men to hold a breach, or arrest the advance of a Roman column; men who will die, rather than give way a foot. When that time comes, my band shall fill the gap. ”

“ The outbreak of the most horrible, the most sanguinary revolution the world has ever seen, the slaughter of hundreds and thousands, the dissolution of all order and propriety, — but never the destruction of Holy Church. ”

“ Kings who perhaps might otherwise have kept quiet, are set on fire by those very men, who ought, if they acted in character, to cool the ardour of warring potentates by their official and sacred authority. Nay, what is more monstrous still, clergymen actually wage war in person, and with a view to obtain shares in prizes or preferments; things, which the philosophers among the heathens held in contempt; and the contempt of which is the peculiar and appropriate distinction of men who profess to follow the apostles. ”