The panic was like miracle—equally rapid and unaccountable. I rode to the top of the hill and discovered the secret. Constantius, observing the enemy’s attention taken up with my advance, had made his way round the heights. His trumpet gave the first notice of the maneuver. Their rear was threatened, and the cavalry fled, leaving a cohort in our hands.
Never was successful soldier honored with a more clamorous triumph than Constantius. Nature speaks out among her untutored sons. Envy has nothing to do in such fields as ours. He was applauded to the skies.
“Well,” said I, as I pressed the gallant hand that had planted the first laurel on our brows, “you see that, if plowmen and shepherds make rude soldiers, they make capital judges of soldiership. You might have conquered a kingdom without receiving half this panegyric in Rome.”
“The service is but begun, and we shall have another lesson to get or give to-morrow. Those fellows are grateful, I allow,” said he, with a smile, “but you must confess that, for what has been done, we have to thank the discipline that brought us into the Roman rear.”
“Yes, and the discipline that made them so much alarmed about their rear as to run away when they might have charged and beaten us.”
A Scene of Inspiration
This little affair put us all in spirits, and the songs and cheerful clamors burst out with renewed animation. But the appearance of the enemy soon became evident. We found the ruined cottage, the torn-up garden, the burned orchard—those habitual evidences of the camp. As we advanced, the tracks of wagons and of the huge wheels of the military engines were fresh in the grass, and from time to time some skeleton of a beast of burden, or some half-covered wreck of man, showed that desolation had walked there; the cavalry soon appeared on the heights in larger bodies; but all was forgotten in the sight that at length rose upon the horizon—we beheld, bathed in the richest glow of a summer’s eve, the summits of the mountains round Jerusalem, and glorious above them, like another sun, the golden beauty of the Temple of temples!
What Jew ever saw that sight but with homage of heart? Fine fancies may declaim of the rapture of returning to one’s country after long years. Rapture! to find ourselves in a land of strangers, ourselves forgotten, our early scenes so changed that we can scarcely retrace them, filled up with new faces, or with the old so worn by time and care that we read in them nothing but the emptiness of human hope; the whole world new, frivolous, and contemptuous of our feelings. Where is the mother, the sister, the woman of our heart? We find their only memorials among the dead, and bitterly feel that our true country is the tomb.
But the return to Zion was not of the things of this world. The Jew saw before him the city of prophecy and power. Mortal thoughts, individual sorrows, the melancholy experiences of human life, had no place among the mighty hopes that gathered over it, like angels’ wings. Restoration, boundless empire, imperishable glory, were the writing upon its bulwarks. It stood before him, the Universal City, whose gates were to be open for the reverence of all time; the symbol to the earth of the returning presence of the Great King; the promise to the Jew of an empire, triumphant over the casualties of nations, the crimes of man, and even the all-grasping avarice of the grave.
The multitude prostrated themselves; then rising, broke forth into the glorious hymn sung by the tribes on their journeys to the Temple: