Attila and His Conquerors: A Story of the Days of St. Patrick and St. Leo the Great

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

CHAPTER XI.
A FIELD OF SLAUGHTER, AND A FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.

So the flood of destruction was turned aside from Troyes, and swept on to the deadly encounter with the armies of Rome and her allies, under the command of Aetius the great Roman general, and Theodoric the Gothic king, in the Catalaunian plains near Châlons.

The great shock of the battle of the nations (the Hunnenschlacht) came at last.

It was said that before the battle, Attila had a solemn consultation in his tent with his augurs, and by various methods of divination they warned him of disaster, but said that a great leader of his foes would fall on the field; and that Attila, believing that this leader must be Aetius, deemed that the loss of thousands would be compensated by the death of that one. Probably personal resentment also may have entered into his dislike of Aetius, once a hostage among the Huns, and afterwards their ally.

But whether the battle was forced on him or chosen by him, and how it began, none seem able to say. The confusion that hangs about the story of great battles does not begin with gunpowder; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke, and the dust of the arena hang in blinding clouds around them all. And this conflict on the plains between Troyes and Châlons was one of the great critical battles of the world. A little shallow runnel of water, it was said, became a great torrent of blood on that fatal field. Three hundred thousand were left there dead. “A battle ruthless, manifold, immense, obstinate,” fought on from the afternoon into the night. In the morning after it the Romans and the Gothic allies, left in possession of the field, strewn with corpses, saw that the Huns did not return to the fight, but kept encamped behind their wagons, where they had fled for shelter. This was all the proof they had of victory. The battle was scarcely won; but the Huns were gone, and they were suffered to go unpursued. Gone as it proved for ever; from Gaul and all Teutonic Europe. But of that no man then could be sure.

Marius wrote on the morrow of the battle—“The messengers are to start for Rome at once. Fortunately only my left hand is wounded, and that but slightly, and so I can write. The battle is won; or at least it is over. The battle-field and the dead are left to us. The Huns are behind their wagons. Theodoric, the brave old Gothic king, is slain. Some say Attila would have been content to lose the battle if Aetius had fallen, as he thought the augurs promised. But Aetius lives and diplomatizes still. And the heroic old Goth is dead—a hero and king to the last. Unmindful of his threescore years, I saw him galloping to and fro, cheering on his people to the fight, when he was thrown from his horse, and fell under the feet of the advancing horsemen. They are searching now for his body among the heaps of slain who died around their king.

“They say Attila in leading on his hosts bade them despise our Roman forces with the ancient defensive array of the shields locked into the testudo, and make their onset on the young nations who could not only defend themselves but assail. ‘Cut the sinew and the limbs will relax,’ he cried. ‘Him who is fated to conquer no dart will touch; him who is doomed to die Fate will find amidst the sloth of peace.’ He might have spared his taunts to us Romans. Romans or barbarians, who could say who fought best when all fought with the hope of beating back the flood of destruction for ever, and with the certainty that if it were not beaten back, it would overwhelm them all? It was no conflict between machines and battering-rams and Roman walls, but between flesh and blood, fierce and desperate men fighting hand to hand for life or death. They say three hundred thousand lives were lost upon this fatal field; three hundred thousand souls there passed away—whence or whither, who can say? Every kind of weapon was there—javelin, spear, huge Tartar bow, Roman shield and sword; amidst the din of every kind of language. Never, I should think, could confusion have been greater; and to confusion of tongues, before the battle ended, was added the bewilderment of darkness. We began at three o’clock, and the conflict raged on through the night. Aetius himself strayed in the dark amongst the Huns, whose language, fortunately for him, he knew. And yet, in spite of the confusion of tribes and tongues, the issue is clear, clearer I think than the issue of battles can often be. For it is, at bottom, the conflict of civilization with barbarism, of hope with despair, of building with destroying, of order with anarchy, of heathenism with Christianity, of life with death; and in the main, civilization, order, hope, Christianity, life, have won the day.