Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.”—Byron.
The word battlefield is a euphemism for human shambles. And “the chief who in triumph advances” is, in grim reality, but the lustiest and the bloodiest of the dogs of war. And the Alexanders, Cæsars, Napoleons are the madmen who have made men mad by their contagion, and have so accumulated horrors Pelion-Ossa piled on horrors as to make the angels weep o’er this mad planet of the universe.
A forceful peculiarity of mental unsoundness is the vehemence with which its victim conceives himself to be right and everybody else wrong, himself sane and all not in agreement with him insane. This fatuity is characteristic of ages as well as of individuals. It is manifest in the complaisant superiority which every age, every generation assumes toward the immediately preceding. “Back in the past, during the Dark Ages, in primitive times, etc.” are the words of balm with which the passing hour begins its own eulogy.
But blood is blood and hate is hate and war is war, whether waged by Macedonian Alexander B. C. 331, or by the Balkan forces A. D. 1912. Shades of the fallen upon that age-long battle ground! wouldn’t you feel strangely at home in the fray if by any chance you should come to life today?
International courts of justice, arbitration, disarmament, World-Peace—will they ever prevail? Knowing the past, knowing the heart of man, we answer No: dreaming of the future, dreaming of the godlike in the heart of man, we answer Yes.
So all day long the tide of battle rolled—from early day till dark. And William and his Norman followers were in possession of the field, and round them lay a host of dead and wounded, yet by reason of the sudden darkness and the exhaustion of the troops, no search could be made even for the Norman wounded: and tho’ groans and cries of thirst and deep sighings arose incessantly from the writhing masses just darker than the darkness, yet no search could be made or any aid given by reason of the utter exhaustion of the troops.
And on that field of death and awfully dying life Harold Godwin lay happily dead under a heap of the slain. Two monks, lanterns in hand, went out to search for him and with them went also the mother of Harold and Edith the woman that loved him. After hours of fruitless search amid scenes of gruesome horror, and as the dawn burst in red wonder over a bleeding world, Edith discovered Harold. So changed was he, so mutilated, hacked and hewed, blood-clotted, dismembered, that even his mother knew him not but the woman that loved him knew. With great difficulty was the body of Harold extricated from under the heap of the slain, but the monks and the women persevered at their task and finally bore him away.
William the Conqueror.
We know only what life has brought within our own cognition; beyond that all is conjecture. The love turned to hate and delighting in the avenging pangs of a lover is utterly uncognizable by the man or woman unto whom love is love forevermore. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s weird poem “Sister Helen” is, thank God, quite meaningless to the greater number of women: and yet such women as Sister Helen exist; they know each other; they understand the poem.
Strange, indeed, was that practice among primitive people, of injuring an image of an enemy and claiming that thereby, in like manner, they injured the enemy. In the poem referred to, the woman is engaged in the magic rite of holding a waxen image in the flame and letting it slowly consume under incantation. She is interrupted from time to time by her wondering little brother, and in her answers to him Helen makes known her wrongs, her slighted love, her love turned to hate, her revenge, her vindictive madness, her black-art vengeance reaching even beyond the grave, her triumph-despair. At the end of the incantation as for the seventh time she turns the waxen figure and it breaks up and melts dripping away—her perjured lover dies.