During the battle they drummed on hides fastened over the wagons, and made a horrible noise. When the largest and most warlike part of the Cimbri had been annihilated, and the Romans pursued the rest within the wall of the camp, they were astounded by a highly tragic spectacle. The Cimbri women standing in black garments of mourning on the wagons, inflicted death upon the fugitives: one upon her husband, another upon her brother, another again upon her father. But their own children they strangled and hurled under the wheels of the wagons and under the hoofs of the horses. Finally they laid hands upon themselves. One, it is said, was hanging from the top of a wagon with her children, tied with ropes, dangling from her ankles.
The later struggles, too, between the Teuton and the Roman offer many examples of the German woman's absolute contempt of a life which could be preserved only in shame and servitude.
When Drusus battled with the Cherusci, Suevi, and Sigambri, it happened that their women, besieged by the Romans in their wagon fortifications (Wageriburg), instead of surrendering, desperately defended themselves with everything that might serve as a weapon. Finally despairing, they struck their children against the ground and hurled their dead bodies in the face of the enemy. The most perfect model of heroic stoicism in connection with those wars, Princess Thusnelda, whose fate we discussed above, was only the first woman among her equals. Teutonic women in those primitive times invariably followed their husbands to war, carrying food and encouragement to the warriors in battle, counting proudly the wounds of their husbands and sons, and nursing the wounded. Through threats or entreaties they restored many a tottering battle array, inciting the men to heroism.
CHAPTER II
THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS
Until the period of the migrations of the Teutons, the precursors of which were the hapless attempts of the Cimbri and the Teutones to invade the Roman Empire, the ancient world, as known to history, was sharply divided into two parts: the Roman world and the world of the Barbarians. The consequences of the invasion and infiltration of the Germanic barbarians into the northern and western provinces of the Roman Empire were the ethnographic combinations from which arose well-nigh all the nations of modern Europe. It is those barbarians who created the mixture of blood, of ideas and ideals, of institutions and customs, from which every State of Europe was born. Their influence for good, as for evil, was lasting and universal.
The combinations of the Teutonic races during the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, until the race movement came to some sort of a standstill under the Carlovingian dynasty, were numberless. When we consider those tribes rushing one upon another, the newcomers ever pressing upon those before them, as waves beating upon a shore, and see the first germs of incipient civilization overwhelmed again and again by swift following surges of barbarity, or even savagery, when we observe newly formed states crushed and swallowed up by opposing states, we have great difficulty in perceiving anything but the play of the blind, brutal forces of nature. The changes are countless, a tremendous revolution endures for centuries, and everything is in a state of flux; and yet, such were the influences evolved from this chaos that there is no modern Caucasian state, however remote, where the Germanic impulses springing from the migration period are not to-day visible.
But, in spite of the existing confusion, there was no epoch of human history when the influence of thought is more plainly manifest than in the time of the Teutonic upheaval that left no stone unturned. There was no German knight who did not endeavor to adopt some shred of the Roman Empire which he helped to tear to pieces.
Christianity, too, which for centuries was but a vague longing in the hearts of most men, began to arise and to assert itself, at first indefinitely, still groping in darkness and strongly intermingled with the ingrained and venerated pagan conceptions, then more and more as a living issue. Christianity so gained in force that at the time of supreme need it saved humanity from sinking back into the degeneracy of the Roman bacchanal. Under the action of Christianity the ephemeral barbarian confederacy crystallizes into a permanent political organization.