Slaying

“ I showed thee favour more than any else and thou wouldst do with me this abominable deed.” Then arose two of the king’s pages and said to him, “O our lord, an thou order it, we will smite his neck.” But the king said, “Haste in killing is a vile thing, for ’tis [162] a grave matter; the quick we can kill, but the killed we cannot quicken, and needs must we look to the end of affairs. The slaying of this youth will not escape us.” ”

“ Before they committed the crime of crimes, before they killed their Master, before the cross, before the slaying of Christ, it was an abomination. ”

“ To wake once more to killing, killing, killing.
Give me the hunter's hand, the patriot's fervour
To hold death naught, or for my land to serve her,
Slay and still slay, with heart that holds no sorrow
For these dead men and all their carnal horror.
Was I not one who loved my land for growing
Sweet, eager life, and pretty things all blowing?
How glad these hands to give their toil, how willing,
That now, O God ! grow strong in killing, killing. ”

“ I kill, and I make alive. I wound, and I heal. There is no one who can deliver out of my hand. 32:40 For I lift up my hand to heaven, And say, As I live forever, 32:41 if I whet my glittering sword, My hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to my adversaries, and will recompense those who hate me. 32:42 I will make my arrows drunk with blood. My sword shall devour flesh with the blood of the slain and the captives, from the head of the leaders of the enemy. 32:43 Rejoice, you nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants. ”

“ He struck the first blow. He killed. He struck the second blow then. He killed. He was striking and killing. There was one man at the end outside. When he came killing, drawing towards him, he went out of the row. He went up on the side of a hill.
“Death and destruction and the death-bands on you, champion of the red belt! It is you that are [90] doing the slaughter on this strand to-day. Don’t you know what country you came out of?—that it is out of a two-ended barrel you came in to the court and castle of the King of Greece?” ”

“ But hast thou not more special sins than these,
No wrong, no murder?
KNIGHT. Murder have I none,
If murder be to kill a man by stealth
Or in a private quarrel, but in war
I oft have slain my man. I wear a sword
Though nature gave me not a butcher's hand
That loves to use it.—Oh, 't is marvellous
How men will slaughter for the sake of blood,
And Christians too. ”

“ I had heard, and that from authority which appeared not to be doubted, that you had been mad enough to engage in a duel, notwithstanding all the principles which I have endeavored to instill into your mind; that you had killed your adversary, and that the slain man was your cousin Henry. Now I have ever held, and have endeavored to teach you to hold, that dueling is not only murder, but murder of the most aggravated kind. The slaughter of the man may take place by accident--by a hasty blow in a moment of passion--in self-defense, when suddenly assailed--or in a general tumult or commotion ”

“ Slowly, at last, came the step of the dead, heavily ascending the stairs;—he entered—I rushed to meet him, and the long pent up agony of my soul burst forth in madness uncontrolled. ‘Monster!—murderer!—destroyer of thy father and thy brother! why comest thou thus to torture and not kill? why is thy bloody hand for ever raised, p. 220and yet forbearing to fall? If thine aim be vengeance, strike—strike—strike—thou blood-bespotted horror! and rend from hope and from life those who dared to make thee what thou art!—Strike, thou silent, sullen thing! ”

“ No one touched the grey-headed murderer, who knelt down—not to pray, but to look into his son's eyes—and to examine his lips—and to feel his left breast—and to search out all the symptoms of a fainting-fit, or to assure himself—and many a corpse had the plunderer handled on the field after hush of the noise of battle—that this was death. ”

“ There is a great slaughter made in the midst of thee, many slain, and great men. It is probable that, when the city was taken, the generality of the inhabitants were put to the sword. Then did the wounded cry, and they cried in vain, to the pitiless conquerors; they cried quarter, but it would not be given them; the wounded are slain without mercy, or, rather, that is the only mercy that is shown them, that the second blow shall rid them out of their pain. ”

“ I beheld my friend, stretched upon the earth, ghastly with a mortal wound, alone, with no traces of the slayer visible, no tokens by which his place of refuge might be sought, the motives of his enmity or his instruments of mischief might be detected.
I hung over the dying youth, whose insensibility forbade him to recognise his friend, or unfold the cause of his destruction. I accompanied his remains to the grave; I tended the sacred spot where he lay; I once more exercised my penetration and my zeal in pursuit of his assassin. ”

“ If the revolt and treachery of all most dear to him, the hatred of his very flesh and blood, the unceasing enmity of his own sons, a miserable old age, and a heart-broken death-bed—if these things may be deemed Heaven’s vengeance upon murder—then, of a surety, that murder was avenged! ”

“ Every old man and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of the houses; strong men—fathers, lovers, sons—had been murdered with every wantonness of savagery conceivable. ”

“ We have all steeped our hands in blood in honor of that God who said to us: 'thou shalt not kill.' If we continue in this way, soon in this beauteous land the groans of the tortured and the blood of the slain will cry to heaven as in the Netherlands and in France, and what that may mean, is only known to one who may have experienced it on his own body. ”

“ The name of this sacrifice,-- "the _murder_ of the OX,"--the pains taken by each person who had a hand in the slaughter to lay the blame on some one else, together with the formal trial and punishment of the axe or knife or both, prove that the OX was here regarded not merely as a victim offered to a god, but as itself a sacred creature, the slaughter of which was sacrilege or murder. ”

“ If they are in a murderous mood, nothing less than a full-grown battle, with a big list of killed and wounded, will satisfy their thirst for blood; and if they fancy a touch of the ghastly, nothing will do but new-made graves, coffins, corpses, gibbering ghosts, and grinning skeletons. ”

“ They had looked on while innocent and gentle women and children were ruthlessly slaughtered, but the sight of one of their own number slain was one that aroused all their fiercest feelings of revenge, and ere it could be well said that they had had time for thought swords and daggers were flashing in the light, the fair, flower-bestrewn earth was streaming with blood, and mangled bodies of dead and dying creatures, some still clasping their simple offerings, that pleaded for good-will, in their stiffening hands, were piled in awful heaps around the camping ground. ”

“ The business of this age is murder,—the slaughter of animals, the slaughter of fellow-men, by the wholesale. Hilarious poets who never fired a gun write hunting songs,—Ti-ra-la: and good bishops write war-songs,—Ave the Czar! ”

“ But the savage barbarity exercised upon the bodies of our unfortunate brethren who fell, is almost incredible : not contented with shooting down the unarmed, aged, and infirm, they disregarded the cries of the wounded, killing them without mercy, and mangling their bodies in the most shocking manner. ”

“ Never shall ye eat in blood your shameful feasts through sin defiled with blood. For most he injureth himself and his soul's honour whoso shall slay another with the sword. Verily! in no wise shall his heart have joy in his reward! For many times more heavily will I avenge man's life upon his murderer, because his sword hath prospered in violence and blood, and his hands in death. ”

“ When a soldier fell fighting in the field, and his body could not be found, he was honoured with the carriage of an empty bier, and funeral ceremonies as if his remains were present.
If a man killed himself, the hand with which the deed was committed was cut off, and buried in another place to that in which the other part of the body was interred. If one man killed another in a righteous cause, the slayer washed his hands and held up the weapon that had been used towards the sun, with the blood on it, to show that he feared not though the heavens as well as the earth knew what he had done. ”

“ Murder itself might have lost its horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers enfeebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their slumbers by the glare of conflagration, reflected from gleaming cutlasses and from the faces of demons. ”

“ Our people made this slaughter, Of these, the kings of all the world, And drank our full of vengeance. Our fierce and conquering arms Laid many a noble warrior low; Many a sword and shield Lay shattered on the strand, The strand of Fintray of the port; Many dead bodies lay upon the earth, Many a hero with a vacant grin. Much was the spoil we gathered in the fight. Patrick, son of noble Alpin, Even of the Feine themselves, none did escape The fierce and murderous fight Except two ordered bands, Nor were their bodies whole. ”

“ I come from killing.
⁠I go to more.
I drive red joy ahead of me from killing.
Red gluts and red hungers run in the smears and juices of my inside bones:
The child cries for a suck mother and I cry for war. ”

“ Is slaughter'd at his crib, he slaughter'd me. ⁠500
Such was my dreadful death; carnage ensued
Continual of my friends slain all around,
Num'rous as boars bright-tusk'd at nuptial feast,
Or feast convivial of some wealthy Chief. ”

“ As if by magic, the savages appeared at every point, yelling like demons of death, and slaughtering all they met. The men in the fields were killed with their own hoes and hatchets. Those in the houses were murdered on their own hearth-stones. So unlooked-for and terrible was the assault that in that day of blood three hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children fell victims to their merciless foes. ”

“ And by the sword of slaughter, all the judgements are sweetened at their root and all the bad is removed from it, and human spirit is refined from beastly spirit, the good from the bad, by this aspect of shooting arrows and returning them, which this is the aspect of slaughter, as mentioned. And therefore the essence of slaughter is by to and fro motion, as our Rabbis z"l said: long enough to move to and fro, is the required length of a knife. ”

“ And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it. They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet high and, bless you, it does them good—it is like a tonic to them. ”

“ And such folk as can heal and cure came to examine into their wounds and to tend them that night, for they could do nothing more for them, so severe and so deadly were the stabs and the thrusts, and the gashes of the many wounds that they had, than to apply to them spells and incantations and charms, in order to staunch their blood, and their bleeding mortal wounds. ”

“ Thousands, ten thousands, are upon record to have been slain, and many of them not with simple deaths, but horrid, exquisite tortures. And yet, how many are there more who have undergone the same fate, of whom we have no memorial extant? ”

“ All, therefore, who have been murdered, you, the instigator of the deed, have slain. Nor indeed does the hand of the butcher glow save at the instigation of your tongue; and that terrible heat of the breast is inflamed by your words to take the blood of others,—blood that shall take a just vengeance upon him who shed it. ”

“ And then again what a fearful glimpse of those blood feuds which, having once begun, seem as if they could never end, blood touching blood, and violence evermore provoking its like, have we in the following: Kill, and thou shalt be killed, and they shall kill him who kills thee. ”

“ Sufficient affirmation on both sides, Conflict again precipitated. One combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way other combatant screams bloody murder. Bloody murder gurgles and dies out, undoubtedly throttled by a stranglehold. ”

“ How great think you must have been the slaughter of the conquered, when the conquerors’ is reported, upon the lowest computation, to have exceeded ten thousand? Oh how vast a flood of human gore was poured out in that place where these unfortunates fell and were slain! What a dashing to pieces of arms, what a clashing of strokes; what shrieks of dying men ”

“ If this nest of man-eaters was hellish before in its bloodstained horror, words fail to describe its aspect now. The savage shouts of the assailants, the despairing screeches of women and children, who have come forth only to find all escape cut off, the gasping groans of the wounded and of the slain, the gaping gashes and staggering forms, and ever around, grim, demon-like countenances, with teeth bared and a perfect hell of blood-fury gleaming from distended eyeballs. All is but another inferno-picture, too common here in the dark places of the earth. ”

“ Young lads spent all their days in the slaughter-houses, dealing violent deaths, witnessing tragedies of carnage, hearing incessant plaintive cries, walking about on clogs among pools of clotting or steamy blood, and breathing the fumes of it. ”

“ When the deadly fight was fought, When the great revenge was wrought, When on the slaughtered victims lay The minion stiff and cold as they, Doomed to exile, sealed with flame, From the west the wanderer came. ”