Wardroom

“ The spirit is slain and the flame is gone, And his blood lies red on the snow fields near it. But again from the dead will the spirit rise, And flash his spears in the northern skies. Then the chief and the queenly Wiwâstè stood Alone in the moon-lit solitude, And she was silent and he was grave. "And fears not my daughter the evil spirit? The strongest warriors and bravest fear it The burning spears are an evil omen; They threaten the wrath of a wicked woman, Or a treacherous foe; but my warriors brave, When danger nears, or the foe appears, Are a cloud of arrows,—a grove of spears." ”

“ Through this smoky darkness came the missiles of death, plowing great furrows of destruction among our men, whole columns going down like grass before the scythe. The scene of carnage and death beggars description. Not for the world would the writer look upon such a sight again. In any direction might be seen guns, swords, haversacks, heads, limbs, flesh and bones in confusion or dangling in the air or bounding on the earth. ”

“ It is the place of skulls, where Death holds his carnival in companionship with worms, and hell laughs in the face of heaven. Dark storms are gathering there—convolving clouds, charged with no common wrath. Terrors set themselves in battle-array before the Son of God; and tempests burst upon Him which might sweep all mankind in a moment to eternal ruin. Hark! hear ye not the subterranean thunder? Feel ye not the tremor of the mountain? It is the shock of Satan’s artillery, playing upon the Captain of our Salvation. ”

“ The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth. A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and they battle and fall and disappear into night. ”

“ Nine doors there are to the house, and at each door a hundred warriors will fall by his hand. And when every one in the house has ceased to ply his weapon, ’tis then he will resort to a deed of arms. And if he chance to come upon you out of the house, as numerous as hailstones and grass on a green will be your halves of heads and your cloven skulls and your bones under the edge of his sword. ”

“ Wiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, he saw the barbarians running everywhere; they were screaming in superstitious terror and fighting one another in their desperate anxiety to escape the vicinity of their precious fire-god. A tremendous voice boomed out over the hubbub, a voice that came from the crater in vast commanding gutturals that struck terror into the souls of the panicky barbarians. ”

“ What evil thing abideth with this warder of the strife, This burg and treasure chamber for the hoarding of my life? For this is the work of the dwarfs, and no kindly kin of the earth; And all we fear the dwarf-kin and their anger and sorrow and mirth. ”

“ Surely enough before long a hoarse, sullen roar arose, becoming louder and louder, till from the parapet surrounding the enclosure the great avenues that led to it could be seen dark with masses of warriors rolling on in a confused tide towards the fortress, while at the same time the flat roofs of the neighbouring houses were suddenly covered, as if by magic, with swarms of menacing figures, brandishing their weapons—a sight to appal the stoutest heart. ”

“ As the impatient and sluggish breathing of the Destroyer drew near, with a sound as of Earthquake and Pestilence laboring afar off, there appeared upon the outermost verge of the scaffold, near the fortress, a man of a simple and majestic presence, wearing no symbol of power, no badge of authority, before whom the multitude gave way with headlong precipitation, as though but to touch the hem of his garment were death itself, or something yet worse than death. ”

“ The sun in universal carnage sets, And, halting higher, The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats, Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned, That, balked, yet stands at bay. Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline, A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray, And in her lifted hand swings high o’erhead, Above the waste of war, The silver torch-light of the evening star Wherewith to search the faces of the dead. ”

“ In a moment every lamp was extinguished, and by the straggling starlight might be caught glimpses of a scene of wild confusion, as men and shrieking women sprang in vain to the egress, and, driven back on each other by the swords of the soldiers, struggled in mad panic towards the various subterranean hiding-places and passages, which branched out of the sandpit, and were the beginning of the catacombs. ”

“ With shield and stone-axe, stride across the wold;
The voice of spears was heard, the rattling spear
Shaken by arms of mighty bone, in strength,
Long mouldered, of barbaric majesty.
I called on Darkness—but before the word
Was uttered, midnight darkness seemed to take
All objects from my sight; and lo! again
The Desert visible by dismal flames;
It is the sacrificial altar, fed
With living men—how deep the groans! the voice
Of those that crowd the giant wicker thrills
The monumental hillocks, and the pomp
Is for both worlds, the living and the dead. ”

“ Then, in a vision, as he lies sleeping on his couch, with his armour on and his sword-hilt grasped in his hand, he sees, one by one, the spectres of all those he has done to death. He wakens in terror. ”

“ Presently the noise of their armies shall be as the roaring of the sea; the dazzling of their arms shall blind the eyes like lightning; their battle-fields shall be as the dissolution of the world; and the slaughter-ground shall resemble a garden of plantain trees after a storm. At length they shall spread like the march of a host of ants over the land. ”

“ All sudden, gorgons hiss, and dragons glare, And ten-horn'd fiends and giants rush to war. Hell rises, Heaven descends, and dance on earth: Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball, Till one wide conflagration swallows all. ”

“ That we might at any moment find a demon or a dozen demons driving at us—well, that was a possibility which never left our thoughts for one single second. And, in those narrow places, where the ledge contracted to a mere ribbon of rock, it was all one wanted to do to hug the wall and make sure of his footing. A frightful place, truly, in which to meet, even with a revolver, the attack of even one of those winged monsters; and we might find ourselves attacked by a dozen. ”

“ Those who had been foolhardy enough to peep through the windows after nightfall, saw within the spectres of the long-departed denizens engaged in their wonted occupations—headless forms danced through the moonlit apartments, and on one occasion a godly minister and two pious elders were scared out of their senses, by the terrible vision of a raw head and blood-dripping arm, which protruded from the wall in this terrible street, and flourished a sword above their heads, and many other terrors which are duly chronicled in that old calender of diablerie, Satan's Invisible World. ”

“ The hearts of the men on the walls quailed with a weird terror; for through all came the unfamiliar cadences of wild foreign speech, with a sense that this living mass which was closing in around them with deadly purpose, to plunder and kill, to burn and to destroy, was pouring forth from the unknown boundless spaces of savage wildernesses, an interminable tide of destruction swelling up as from some unfathomable abyss of hell. ”

“ Everywhere, as we threaded the mazes of destruction or stepped unwitting in the darkness into pools of blood and mire, were dead warriors in every shape and contortion, lying all asprawl, or piled up one on top of another, or sleeping pleasantly in dreamless dissolution against the red sides of stricken horses. ”

“ At times the corpse was covered by talons and wings; then it was free. There were disappearances of the horde, then sudden furious returns—a frightful torment continuing after life was past. The birds seemed frenzied. The air-holes of hell must surely give passage to such swarms. Thrusting of claws, thrusting of beaks, croakings, rendings of shreds no longer flesh, creakings of the gibbet, shudderings of the skeleton, jingling of the chain, the voices of the storm and tumult—what conflict more fearful? A hobgoblin warring with devils! A combat with a spectre! ”

“ With passions not of earth, all dimly sensed.
There saw we dæmons fighting in the sky
And battles in aerial mirage,
The feverish Véry lights proclaimed them by,
Their tramplings woke our panting, fierce barrage.
Their tide of battle, hither, thither driven,
Filled earth and sky with cataclysmic throes,
Our strife was but the mimicry of heaven's
And we the shadows of celestial foes. ”

“ Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and the wind. ”

“ I had a dreamy vision in my mind of some rocky gorge, of enemies coming up from a sloping river bank, of a desperate struggle there, and of my own part therein, which seemed to end with a murderous bowshot from behind, driving a shaft through my body; but what had happened afterward? Where had they carried me and how could I be living after such fearful hurt? I fumbled still at my breast seeking the arrow-head, and found at last what I had mistaken for it. ”

“ There in the whitewashed wards with the smell of blood and ether, where the maimed lie stiff and still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in horror at the destruction of men! ”

“ And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.
Here they are. We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world—a cavalcade of warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords. They are burdened with weapons; they send forth gleams of light ”

“ On the drab earth, beaten lifeless by carnage and corruption, drab bodies lay, oozing thin streams of pink blood, which formed dark, mysterious little pools by their sides. Jaws were slack—dark, objectionable caverns in pallid faces. Some men still moaned, or, in a tone into which discouragement had crept, called for help. ”

“ In the blaze of burning dwellings the armor becomes white-hot, but he is unharmed. A wise hermit counsels exorcism. With this spiritual weapon the devil-leader is overcome and captured; and within the armor they find—nothing at all! In true folk-story fashion the narrative rambles on with details of the escape and recapture of the devil-armor "a hundred times." In the end, following again the wise hermit's counsel, the armor is cast into a furnace; and then, being melted, is refounded—to the accompaniment of diabolical shrieks and groans of agony—into a cross. ”

“ It is as the voices of the spirits of the dead. There is an overpowering and mesmeric influence in the very atmosphere. Then gleams forth a flickering green light which plays on the face of the rock like a corpse candle. Suddenly the whole of that crouching phalanx starts up erect. A deep-toned murmur, sounding like a muffled roar, goes forth from the throats of two hundred dark warriors, and the ghostly light glints on a forest of bristling assegais. ”

“ Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them the dead, the dying and the tortured. ”

“ Finally he went off into one of his characteristic speeches. “That which the warld torments me in most is the awful confusion of noise. It is the devil’s own infernal din all the blessed day long, confounding God’s warks and His creatures—a truly awfu’ hell-like combination, and the warst of a’ is a railway whistle, like the screech of ten thousand cats, and ivery cat of them all as big as a cathédral.” ”

“ The nameless scourge of barbarians was visible in the faces and bodies of many a hideous-looking human being, who, disfigured, bloated, marred and scarred, came, impelled by curiosity, to hear and see us who had come from the forest land east, and who were reckless of the terror they inspired by the death embodied in them. ”

“ When scarce his chirping bill had broke the shell.
Loud uproar hence, and rage of arms arose,
And the fell rancour of encountering foes;
Hence dwarfs and cranes one general havoc whelms,
And Death’s grim visage scares the pygmy realms. ”

“ The human torrents pour,
Horde following upon horde as flood on flood,
Avengers of the slain they come, they come,
And break in thunder on the walls of Rome.
A trembling people waits
As, surging through its gates,
Break the fierce Goths with trumpet-blasts of doom ”