Battle.
From early dawn even until darkness frowned over the field the blood-feast flowed: and Death was satiated.
Attila withdrew to his camp. He left an effective guard around his wagons and outposts and made every thing ready for a prolonged and obstinate resistance to the attack anticipated at early dawn. Nevertheless he built for himself a massive funeral pile, placed upon it his most valued treasures and his favorite wives, and was fully prepared and resolute to apply the torch, ascend the pyre, and so perish in the flames—should defeat fall to his fortune on the following day.
Morning dawned. The awful work of death on the preceding day appalled both armies; miles upon miles of outstretched plain lay covered with carnage; the all-night-writhing mounds of men were ominously still. Sullenly did foe gaze upon foe; but each recoiled from renewal of the slaughter.
Still the advantage was with the allies; for Attila, so late the fierce aggressor, was barricaded in his camp—tho’ grimly awaiting attack indeed, and prepared to resist to the end and die like a lion in his den.
Did the Romans know of that funeral pile? They may not, indeed, have known the peculiar manner in which Attila would seek death, but they knew that he would die by his own hand—if the worst came. Cato had done so and Varus and Brutus and Cassius and Hannibal and Anthony and Cleopatra—ad infinitum.
Addison, in his tragedy Cato, has graphically portrayed the conflicting thoughts and emotions in the mind of a man who feels that life cannot longer be borne and yet shrinks back from the horror and the dread unknown.
Cato had lost the battle of Utica. He had been true to Pompey, he had fought the last battle for the cause of Pompey—and lost. And Cæsar was indeed god of this world, and the morrow held no place on all this so vast earth for Cato; this lost-battle night must end it all. He read Plato’s discourse on the immortality of the soul, and in the lines of Addison, thus soliloquized:
“It must be so. Plato, thou reason’st well:
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself and startles at destruction?
’Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
’Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
* * * * *
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger and defies its point.
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.”
But Attila did not mount his funeral pile. The day passed without attack upon Attila’s formidable position. King Theodoric lay dead upon the plain and his son Prince Thorismund, who had distinguished himself in the battle, was victoriously proclaimed King of the Visigoths.
Ætius, Valentinian’s able general, held in leash both the Romans and the Visigoths even while Attila slowly broke up camp and withdrew in long lines leading northward.