Among the struggles of the past which seem decisively to have subverted the old order of things and ushered in the new, is the battle of Adrianople. There Valens, Emperor of Rome, was killed in battle with the Goths; and the proud Roman army hitherto deemed invincible, almost invulnerable, was defeated and destroyed.
How the wild-eyed children of the North must have gazed with astonishment upon one another as they stood victors on that field! They had not dared to hope that a Roman army would go down under their undisciplined assault; and that an Emperor of Rome should lie dead upon the battlefield was far beyond their wildest dream. Doubtless they felt within them that first awakening of brutal youth-strength: race-childhood was gone; race-manhood not yet come. And enervated old Rome; cultured, wily, effetely civilized Romans lay at the feet of these youthful, battle-flushed barbarians: and history yet hears the cries that arose as those feet advanced ruthlessly trampling.
Rivers.
If rivers could write history—what would the Nile tell us, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Granicus-Issus, the Metaurus, the Aufidus, the Tiber, the Danube, the Moskva, the Maritza?
Mysterious Nile—with sources for ages unknown; with inundations death-dealing, life-giving; with crocodiles and alligators and implacable river God: with Theban Karnak-Luxor and the Necropolis; with Memphis and the Pyramids and the great[41] Sphinx; with dynastic silences perturbed by a few great names—Menes, Cheops, Rameses; with the barge of Cleopatra wafted by scent-sick breezes to a waiting Anthony; with cosmopolitan bad, sad, modern Memphis-Cairo.
Tigris-Euphrates valley—cradle of the human race! home of the Accadians, a pre-historic people that had passed away and whose language had become a dead classic tongue when Nineveh and Babylon were young. Who were the Accadians? Who were the Etruscans? The Euphrates and the Tiber will not tell.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon—world-wonder: Babylon as described by Herodotus—city of blood and beauty and winged power: city surfeited with the slaughter of Assyrian Nineveh: city of the great temple of Bel: city of palaces guarded by majestic colossi—Sphinxes, winged lions, man-head bulls; city of gold and precious stones and ivory edifices and streets of burnished brass: city of the fatal Euphrates, of Baltshazzar’s banquet and the dread hand-writing upon the wall: city of a destruction so tremendous, so terrible that the lamentation thereof, caught vibrantly in Biblical amber, rings on and ever on adown the ages, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!”
“They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.”
—Omar Khayyam.
And the site of Babylon, that mighty Paris of the past, is not now authoritatively known. Does the river know; does it remember the glory and the horror-night and the gloom? Is the sad sighing of rivers caused by the sorrows they see as they flow? And is the eternal moan of ocean the aggregate of the throbs of woe that the rivers have felt as they flow? Does nature know of mortal woe, does she, indeed, lament with Moschus the death of pastoral Bion, with Shelley, the untimely departure of Keats, our “Adonais”?
[42]
Fact or fancy, suggestive silence or assertive sound, poet-dream or cynic-certainty—which draws nearer to truth? which shall prevail?
Granicus-Issus—bloody outlets of the wounds of the world when Macedonian Alexander made Europe and Asia bleed!
Was Alexander the Great great? Moralize as we may; shudder at the grim bloody outlets of a wounded world; wonder at the mad folly of the masses who, at the caprice of a magnetic madman, wildly slay and submit to be slain; see clearly, in the cut and statuary past, the dolt unreason of it all, the uselessness, the Pelion-Ossa horror: yet honestly recognize that deep down in the perverse human heart there lurks loving admiration for—Alexander the Great. Rameses, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal, C?sar, Napoleon—we cannot dissociate these men from their deeds; how then can we disapprove their deeds and approve these men? Why is it that a Shelley, Byron, De Musset, Swinburne, Omar—ad infinitum—enthrall us by the charm of their written words, even tho’ we disagree with them in their tenets, their philosophy of life, their conclusions: and we censure and condemn their private lives! Can men, as Catullus sings to Lesbia, both “adore and scorn” the same object at the same time? There are many replies to these questions, but no satisfactory answer. Psychologists, take note.
The military hero, the “chief who in triumph advances”, the Warrior Bold, the idols of history will continue to glimmer secure in cob-web fascination even when armaments shall have been banished from off the face of the earth and wars shall be remembered only as the myths of days that are no more. We forgive Granicus-Issus-Arbela for the sake of Alexander the Great.
And the conqueror of the world died, aged thirty-two, in Babylon. This cognizant old city and Accadian Euphrates were[43] too wearily wise to wonder two thousand years ago. They had seen the rise and fall of many monarchs: and one more, this boy-wonder from the West, could arouse no throb of pitying surprise from scenes that dully remembered dead and gone dynasties. Why, death was old when Accadia was young ten thousand years ago; lament this stripling? No. And thus went out the conquered Conqueror of the world.
The little stream Metaurus witnessed perhaps the most momentous battle of history. Yet no magic name shines forth from that strife either as victor or vanquished. Nero, the Roman consul, victor; and Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal, vanquished; are not the names of favorites of fame. As Byron says, of a thousand students hearing the name Nero nine hundred and ninety-nine recall the last Julian Emperor of Rome, and one laboriously remembers the hero of Metaurus. And yet were historians endowed with Platonic vision whereby the great is perceived in the small, doubtless the bloody conflict by the stream would be seen pivotal of history.
O hopes and fears and blasted dreams of so gigantic scale, played on a stage of Alpine eminence, no wonder you stand spectacular thro’ the ages!
“Carthagini jam non ego nuntios
Mittam superbos. Occidit, occidit
Spes omnis et fortuna nostri
Nominis, Hasdrubale interemto.”
—Horace.
“Alas, I shall not now send to Carthage proud bearers of good news,” said Hannibal, as he mournfully gazed at the severed head of his brother, hurled insolently into his camp, even as with impatient hope he awaited news of that brother’s coming and dreamed the dream of their successfully united forces, attack on Rome, victory, and the dispatch of proud messengers to Carthage. With prophetic gaze did the hero of Cann? see[44] in that bloodily dead face the negation of his eight years’ victory in Italy, his recall to Carthage, his defeat at Zama, his exile and bitter death, and the onward stride of world-conquering Rome over the ashes of Carthage.
Cities that have been and that are no more: Niobe-woe: rivers that know of that long ago and wearily sigh as they flow!
Old Tiber disdains the paragraph; a volume for it or—nothing.
Lordly dark Danube—so long the barrier between the known and the unknown, civilization and barbarism, the magic sun-gardens of Italy and the Teutoberger Wald!
“Varus, Varus, give back my legions, Varus”—that cry of C?sar Augustus, Ruler of Rome, Mistress of the World, was the first wild note of a chorus of woe that arose in full diapason when Valens fell in the battle of Adrianople. From the victory of Arminius over the Roman troops under Quintilius Varus in the Black Forest of Germany (A. D. 9) to the decisive victory of the combined Gothic tribes over the veteran Roman army under Valens near the capital of the Empire, the sympathetic student of history may hear ever that losing cry of the Emperor-seer, “Give back my legions, Varus.”
Legend relates that on the Roman northern frontier there stood a colossal statue of Victory; it looked toward the North, and with outstretched hand pointing to the Teutoberger Wald, seemed to urge on to combat and victory: but the night following the massacre of the Roman troops in the Black Forest, and the consequent suicide of Varus, this statue did, of its own accord, turn round and face the South, and with outstretched hand pointing Romeward, seemed to urge on to combat and victory the wild-eyed children of the North. Thus did the Goddess of Victory forsake Rome.
The Moskva river is yet memory-lit with the fires of burning[45] Moscow; and its murmuring ever yet faintly echoes the toll, toll, toll of the Kremlin bell. Three days and three nights of conflagration—and then the charred and crumbling stillness! Snow on the hills and on the plains; white, peaceful snow healing the wounds of Borodino, blanketing uncouth forms, hiding the horror; but within the fated city, no snow, nothing white, nothing peaceful; gaunt icicle-blackness o’er huge, prostrate Pan-Slavism.
Yet surely cognizant old Moscow, secure in ruins, sighed, too, o’er the gay and gallant Frenchmen caught fatefully in the trap of desolation. Perhaps, too, the compensating lamentation of distant Berezina mingled genially with the murmuring Moskva.
Little Nap Bonaparte met his Waterloo in Moscow: history to the contrary notwithstanding.
“The soldiers fight and the kings are called heroes,” says the Talmud. Of all that nameless host of ardent, life-loving men who entered Moscow, stood aghast amid the ruins, started back on that awful across-Continent retreat—the world knows only Napoleon, history poses Napoleon, Meissonier paints Napoleon, Byron apostrophizes Napoleon, Emerson eulogizes Napoleon, Rachmaninoff plays Napoleon, and the hero-lover loves Napoleon. Why? Is there any answer to ten thousand Whys perched prominently and grinning insolently in this mad play-house of the Planets? None.
“What hope of answer or redress
Beyond the veil, beyond the veil!
* * * * *
And yet we somehow trust that good
Will be the final goal of ill,
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shriveled in a fruitless fire
Or but subserves another’s gain.”
* * * * *
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The Maritza river, at one time called the Orestes river, is formed by the confluence of two unimportant streams. Adrianople is favorably situated, and ranks next to Constantinople in natural advantages.
Orestes, son of Agamemnon, built the city and gave his name both to the city and the principal river. Emperor Hadrian changed the name to Hadrianopolis (Hadrian’s city), thence our modernized Adrianople. One almost regrets that the name of the restless Orestes did not continue appropriately to designate the city of so varying fortunes and vivid vicissitudes.
Adrianople was the Turkish capital for nearly a hundred years; it was abandoned in 1453 when Constantinople came into Turkish control. The ruins of the palaces of the Sultans yet grace the ancient capital.
Adrianople is the faithful Moslem city of forty mosques. The mosque Selim II. is a close rival to Santa Sofia.
Greek and Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine, Christian and Moslem, Turk and Bulgarian, influences have in turn dominated the city of three rivers; each re-baptizing it with blood: and the end is not yet.
In 1713, Charles XII. of Sweden was a guest in the castle of Tumurtish. Little then did the valiant Madman of the North dream how ignominiously his own meteoric career would close: little did he see himself as fixed in fame, not by his combats and victories, not even by his gallant defeat at Pultowa, but by being the inspiration in the moralizing mind of Dr. Samuel Johnson of the following lines:
“He left a name—at which the world grew pale—
To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
The Vanity of Human Wishes is indeed exemplified not only in Charles XII. of Sweden, but also in many other favorites of fortune: not one of whom, perhaps, but would add to or alter his own peculiar setting in fame—if perchance he should be able to recognize himself at all in the historic figure masquerading[47] under his name. How seldom does it chance that the world honors a man for what that man feels to be his best title to honor?
Would Julius C?sar, red-hand conqueror of Gaul, know himself as the Shakespearean hero? And Nero, Louis XI., Wallenstein, Henry VIII., Roderick Borgia—would they claim even passing acquaintance with themselves as fame has fixed them? If these men took any of their fighting qualities with them into the Spirit Land, there must have been some flamy duelling when they met their respective biographers.
And so the blood of battle bathed Adrianople one thousand five hundred and thirty-five years ago and—last year (1913). And we talk learnedly about the defeat and death of the Roman Emperor Valens, and of the effect of that victory upon our respected barbarian ancestors with consequent doings of destiny, etc., etc.—because we don’t know: and we say little about the Servian-Bulgarian-Turkish capture of Adrianople last year, because it is too near and—we know. Then, too, who can poetize or moralize or even sentimentally scribble over the yet hideously bleeding wounds of war? When they are healed, when the moaning is still, the mangled forms moveless, the cripples on crutches gone, the lamentations silenced, the last-lingering heartache soothed in Death—why, then, perhaps; but not now. Battle in the real is a human butchering: and there is no other delusion under the sun more diabolically sardonic than that which makes animal savagery seem patriotism and the red-hand slaughter-man a hero. From the Homeric Hector-Achilles, deliver the world, O Lord.
Strange, indeed, is the contrariety between the real of War and the ideal, the far away hero and the near Huerta, the blood spilled and stilled and the bright life-blood spilling, the sorrow silenced and the agonized cries that arise, the battle of Adrianople, 378 A. D., and the siege and capture and re-capture of Adrianople (1912-1913).