WHERE the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression where{297}from no word issues forth, but destined under God to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.

Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of Europe lying between the Meuse and the Moselle, and one line drawn from Limbourg to Trèves, another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe of this, but who can say what may be in the future? All its great northern portion has for long been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of Belgium, and there it will remain, but there is always the old Archbishopric of Trèves with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands along the Saar and the new (and old) frontiers of France. At present, as a result of three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a fourth the size it once had under its first Duke Wenceslas; the first section was lost in 1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the third and largest at London in 1859, but, as a Japanese guide remarked at the monastery of Horiuji, “The quality is not dependent on the numerality of quantity,” and as nothing was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely concentrated{298} itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.

Luxembourg lies along that line where first the Teuton blended with the primitive Gaul, or Celt, and where a second mingling later took place between the result of the first—the Salian Frank—and the same old Teutonic stock. It is the mating-place of races and therefore the fighting-place as well, and always will remain so, as they and we now realise only too clearly. They were far enough apart, these Celts and Germans, to guarantee good progeny. The Gaul was huge of stature, blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes and golden chains. He was pastoral and agricultural, aristocratic in his social and political systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tempered, superstitious, Druidical. The Teuton was red-haired, shaven except for a fierce top-knot, grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture and of everything else except fighting; as a youth he wore an iron collar which could not be removed until he had killed his man. Politically he was ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and chaste; theologically, monotheistic. From the fusion of these two elements came the many tribes of Gallia Belgica, and in good time most of the{299} peoples of the Heart of Europe, of Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the hither Rhineland, Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois. Trèves, head city of the Treveri, was the natural capital and so it became under the C?sars when they had made their wilderness and called it peace.

It did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific C?sars of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of Rome” and then the Newport of the Empire. Fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and estates. Trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul only to Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich, sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along the Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar{300} and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden day-dream focussed along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to endure for ever.

And then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. The Gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in Rome, and C?sars of a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration, with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of Trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding Moselle. War again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and vines and moss. Out of the terrible east the Huns came like a flood with the deadly Attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and silence behind. Just to the west, at Chalons, they were beaten back and fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became part of the new Frankish kingdom. Of the makers of this nation and the stock from which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend T. H. Passmore writes engagingly thus:

The record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is dim and discursive. Up to that time they were more like a firework display than a people. They appear and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to the standard of so virtuous a prince.... The pious Clovis was a born diplomatist. He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and a Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great.

After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Germans who still barred his progress, and wiping out the Alemanni—those chronic foes whom Rome had found invincible—Clovis listened to the prayers of his Christian wife, Clotilde, and was baptised in Rheims Cathedral by St. Remigius with three thousand of his devoted Franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any trouble about the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown any nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after dismissing with prayer a synod of the Gallican Church, he quietly proceeded to butcher all the Merovingian princes. Having pushed his arms into France, he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered the Goths under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was invested{302} with purple tunic in St. Martin’s church at Tours. Twenty-five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they already possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august imagination. Thus the French kingdom of the Merovingians, to the generation succeeding Clovis, already included all Gaul from western France to the Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the Alps and beyond them.

Luxembourg had long been Christian after a fashion; the first Bishop of Trèves had been appointed by St. Peter himself, while the Emperor Constantine, who had lived much in the city, fostered the new religion in every way. Later, at the time of the era-making Pepin of Heristal, St. Willibrord came from England on his great mission to the heathen of Friesland, and while converting them, and much of Norway and Denmark to boot, established here at Echternach a great monastery that was his spiritual power-house, from which he drew the energy that sent him on his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, for the wi............