Miniatures of French history

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.

Now one day passed and another, and nothing was done; but at night each of the hosts could see the fires of the other, murky in the damp autumn weather, red against the low mists; and every morning, as the late sun rose beyond the valley of the Vienne over the damp fields of October through the fogs, the northern men heard the Arab call to prayer, shrill and singing, and the challenge to their faith and their name. And the Arabs could also see, far off across the space that divided them, men differently habited from the soldiers of Charles. They knew them well, for Spain was full of them. They were the priests.

So one day passed, and another and another, and yet no battle was joined; until at last a week had passed, and it was Saturday. Upon that morning, then, the leader of the Mahommedans, looking northward again to see what the camp of his enemies did, saw it covered all along its front by one packed line, dense, and cramped together as a faggot is cramped in its bond, all facing southward and hiding the tents behind with their line: for this was the army of Charles, now drawn up for battle.

There was a southern man, a Spaniard, who saw that sight, and who said that the men of the north were frozen men—men fixed by the cold with frozen faces, and he said that so standing all in line, not moving at all, they seemed to be a wall.

Then, before such a sight, the Arab army moved and swirled; there was the saddling of horses and the calling of the companies together with the shrill tube, and the words of the East cried from one to another, and accoutrement upon every side, until the light horses and their white-cloaked riders were ready, some with the thin lance levelled, some with the bared scimitar in hand, for the charge; and among them many wore mail, fine and closely linked, and iron upon their heads. But all were mounted for speed and for the rapid turning of a horse this way and that. The line charged. You might have seen the breaking of the white cloaks against those tall northern men, like the breaking of waves against a ridge of rock that bounds the sea. And when from that first charge they rode back, leaving the line unbroken, then one could see, scattered everywhere before that line, the bodies of men fallen, and of horses which the battle-axe had felled.

But again those thousands charged, and again and with every charge lost more, not breaking the northern line. All the short autumn day was full of this fury and of these cries of the Orient, and of the scurry of hoofs; and throughout the full hours the men of Charles took the strain, killing and breaking the attack until, when the night fell, the assault had ruined itself; and in the counting of the dead they found that Abdul Rahman himself had fallen.

The night that followed so furious a day was a night of exhausted sleep. The army of Charles woke upon the morrow to see the day broadening before them over the plains still strewn with so many thousands of men and horses dead, and of wounded who had barely lived through the cold of the night.

As the early mist drew off they could perceive the Saracen tents still standing as widespread as a great town, but they heard no call to prayer nor any shrill trumpet, and they saw no horses at the cords. Charles’s men were set out again for battle, but no enemy showed—only the dead. The columns were marched across the field, through the damp grass and stubble of it, all pounded into mud with the charging and the charging again of such hosts of horse. As they drew near, the skirmishers, riding ahead, challenged; but there was no reply; and as men passed for loot from tent to tent, finding all manner of wealth—blades damascened and jewelled in the hilt, and silks of Asia, cloths, and carpets and hangings, and ornaments of gold, and richly-painted parchments, the sacred writings of these desert men—they found no one alive save here and there some deserting slave who begged for mercy, or a wounded man still breathing, but too near his death to have followed the retreat. For during the night the wreck of that innumerable flood which had crossed the Pyrenees in the rising of the year had drawn back south hurriedly, leaving its train and its tents and its wealth to fall into the hands of the French.

Thus was Christendom saved in the tongue between the rivers, a little south of Chatellerault, and a day’s march north of Poitiers; and if you go there to-day you will find the Roman tower still standing in a ruin, and a little village where the left of the Mahommedan line charged, called Moussais; and when you ask the people of the place what they call Moussais, they will tell you, “We call it Moussais of the Battlefield.” So well does a peasantry remember after the passage of more than a thousand years.