Attila and the Huns

by Edward Hutton

Upon the following morning, the week having been full of thunder, the first rude cavalry of the Huns began to enter the city through the broken gates. The pillage and massacre and rape began, and, as to-day in Belgium, we read with a certain order and system. Nothing was spared, neither the houses of the citizens, nor their holy places, neither age nor sex. It seemed as though all would perish in a vast and systematic vandalism and murder.

Suddenly a cry rose over the noise of the butchery and destruction. The Eagles! The Eagles! And over the mighty bridge that spans the Loire thundered the cavalry of Rome, and the tumultuous standards of the Goths. They came on; nothing might stop them. Step by step they won the bridge head, they fought upon the shore, in the water, through the gates. Street by street, fighting every yard, the Imperial troops pushed on, the glistening eagles high overhead. House by house, alley by alleyway was won and filled with the dead; the Huns broke and fled, the horses stamped out their faces in the byways, in the thoroughfares there was no going, the Barbarian carrion was piled so high; Attila himself was afraid. He sounded the retreat.

That famous and everlasting day was the 14th of June, for Aetius had kept his word. Orleans had begun the deliverance of Gaul and of the West.

VII
THE RETREAT OF ATTILA AND THE BATTLE OF THE CATALAUNIAN PLAINS

The retreat of Attila from Orleans would seem to have been one of the most terrible of which we have any record. The Gothic chronicler Jornandes, writing a hundred years after the events he describes, wholly or almost wholly at the mercy of a Gothic and so a Barbarian legend, would seem, though poorly informed as to facts and details, to be fully justified in the general impression he gives of the horror and disaster which befell the Hunnish host. It is certain that Attila’s withdrawal of his army must have been not only difficult but impossible without disaster: too many and too brutal crimes had been committed for the ruined population of northern Gaul to permit it an easy passage in retreat. The devastated country could no longer supply its needs, everywhere ruined men awaited revenge: it can have been little less than a confused flight that Attila made with his thousands towards the Rhine, with Aetius and Theodoric ever upon his flanks.

Nor was he to escape without battle. The Imperial armies pressing on behind him gained upon him daily, a sufficient comment upon his state, and it was really in despair that he reached at last the city of Troyes, more than a hundred miles from Orleans, an open city which there might, he hoped, be time to loot, and so to restore to some extent the confidence and the condition of his people. That he was not able to loot Troyes is the best evidence we could have of the energy of the Imperial pursuit; but here again we meet with one of those almost incredible interpositions of the spiritual power that we have already seen at Tongres, at Rheims, at Paris, and not least at Orleans. It must have meant almost everything to Attila on his hurried and harassed road north-east out of Gaul to be able to feed and to rest his army at Troyes, where the great road by which he had come crossed the Seine. That he was not able to do this was doubtless due fundamentally to the pressure of Aetius upon his flanks, but there was something more, we are told. Just as Anianus of Orleans had by his prayers saved his city, so Lupus of Troyes defended his town in the same way. He, the Bishop, and now perhaps the governor, of Troyes went forth to Attila, faced and outfaced him, and indeed so impressed and even terrified the superstitious Barbarian that he left Troyes alone and passed on, taking only the Bishop himself with him a prisoner in his train. “For,” said he, mocking him even in his fear, “if I take a man so holy as you with me I cannot fail of good luck even to the Rhine.”

Attila passed on; he had crossed the Seine; before him lay the passage of the Aube, and it was here that the advance guard of the Imperial armies first got into touch with their quarry. It was night. Attila had left the Gepidae to hold the crossing, and it was they who felt the first blows of Aetius whose advance guard was composed of Franks; the fight endured all night and at dawn the passage was won and some 15,000[12] dead and wounded lay upon the field. Attila had crossed into Champagne, but the Imperial army was already at his heels; he would have to fight. The battle which followed, one of the most famous as it is one of the most important in the history of Europe, whose future was there saved and decided, would seem to have been fought all over that wide and bare country of Champagne between the Aube and the Marne, and to have been finally focussed about the great earthwork still called the Camp of Attila by Châlons; it is known to history as the battle of the Catalaunian plains.

It may well be that the fight at the passage of the Aube had given Attila time to reach that great earthwork, one of the most gigantic and impressive things in Europe, which rises out of that lost and barren country of Champagne like something not wholly the work of man. There he halted; convinced at last that he could not escape without battle, he encamped his army and made ready for the conflict.

In this terrible and tragic place he held council, and superstitious as ever in the supreme moment of his career, began to consult an endless procession of soothsayers, augurs and prophets upon the coming battle. From the entrails of birds, or the veins upon the bones of sheep, or the dying gestures of some animal, his sorcerers at last dared to proclaim to him his coming defeat, but to save their heads, perhaps, they added that the general of his enemies would perish in the conflict. It is sufficient witness to the genius of Aetius, to the fear he inspired in the Hun, and should be a complete answer to his enemies and traducers, that Attila, when he heard this, from despair passed immediately to complete joy and contentment. If after all Aetius defeated him at the price of his life, what might he not recover when his great adversary was no more! He therefore made ready with a cheerful heart for the conflict. Jornandes, whom we are bound to follow, for he is our chief, if not quite our only authority for all this vast onslaught of the Hun upon the Gaul, describes for us, though far from clearly, the configuration and the development of the battle. In following this writer, however, it is necessary to remember that he was a Goth, and relied for the most part upon Gothic traditions; also, above all, it is necessary not to abandon our common sense, protest he never so insistently.

Jornandes tells us that Attila put off the fight as long as possible and at last attacked, or so I read him, not without fear and trepidation, about three o’clock in the afternoon, so that if fortune went against him the oncoming of night might assist him to escape. He then sketches the field. Between the two armies, if I read him aright, was a rising ground which offered so much advantage to him who should occupy it that both advanced towards it, the Huns occupying it with their right and the Imperialists with their right, composed of auxiliaries.