"Remember, men, how from generation to generation these Romans have sinned against our people; how again and again they have broken faith and treaty; how they will not even grant us the poor land we have wrested from the marsh and the primeval forest; how, in violation of treaties, they have pushed their fortresses farther and farther into our boundaries; how they forced thousands of our ancestors to fight naked and unarmed with wild beasts on the blood-stained sand of their arenas in the city by the Tiber, gloating, safe in their high seats, over the death-agonies of our kinsmen under the paws and rent by the teeth of roaring monsters; how they forced thousands of our young men into their cohorts and made them shed their blood, often far beyond the salt sea!
"Ha, Alemanni of the Black Forest, do you still know how they invited your King Widigab to a banquet and murdered him over the wine-cup? Have you forgotten, Alemanni of the Ebergau, who submitted to them on condition that you should live according to your own laws, how on the smallest pretext, they had your free men scourged by their lictors? Do you still recollect, Alemanni from the Breisgau, how they asked a peaceful passage through your country, and then encamped near the sacred grove of the goddess Ostara, asked permission to visit the aged priest of eighty and his great-granddaughter, the girl of sixteen, in the grove (it was a General and one of their shaven priests, with a hundred warriors), and inquired what was your most sacred thing? And when the maiden unsuspiciously showed the sacred bronze vessels which the gracious goddess had once sent down to you on the rainbow, how they suddenly seized both, and the Christian priest, before the eyes of the unarmed people, shamefully profaned the sacred vessel; how the General slew the venerable priest and dragged the young priestess away to captivity and disgrace, and how their warriors set fire to the sacred grove?
"Do you still remember, men of the Alpgau, how, in the midst of peace, a centurion dishonored your Count's young wife by her own hearthstone, so that she hanged herself by her girdle?
"Have you forgotten how often they have bound our girls together, yes and our boys, too, like beasts of burden, by their long locks, and driven them forth to a life of disgrace from which the pure gods of Asgard turn their faces, crimson with shame and wrath?
"You have not forgotten these things! I hear it! I see it! Well then, do as I advise: Take no prisoners! Kill them all! Do not spare one; disdain all ransom. Let the whole army,--leaders, horse and foot,--be dedicated to Odin and to Zio. You will: I see it! Then repeat the words after me and swear:
"To thee, Odin, doomed,
And to wrathful Zio,
Be all who live within the camp
And on the rocking galleys.
Soon will ye bathe in blood,