A preternatural terror hung over these hordes, but more especially around Attila himself, the Scourge of God, the ally of demons, who was known now to be in their midst, directing the devastations with the deadliest skill of destruction, practised in ravaging the fairest lands into deserts, and in razing the stateliest cities into ruin so utter as never to be repaired. With a frightful faculty of appropriating from the civilization he sought to destroy just the very elements which enabled him to destroy it, from the courts of Ravenna and Constantinople he had learnt the art of conquering by dividing. And at this moment the chief anxiety in Orleans was the doubt whether he might not have succeeded by his cunning in breaking the alliance between Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, and the great General Aetius, who had promised Bishop Anianus some weeks before in his palace at Arles to relieve the city with the combined forces of Goth and Roman, at the latest, by the fourteenth of June. Attila was too shrewd to attempt to substitute Roman discipline and methods of warfare for the dash and fury of the charges and wheelings of his wild horsemen. But he had learnt something of the art of besieging from his foes, from the captives of the cities he had ruined; and in the dusk of the morning they saw the huge battering-rams being drawn up to the walls. It was the combination of the mechanical weight of a vast multitude, a host not of men but of nations, of the wild swiftness and unexpectedness of their assaults, reckless of peril as a troop of wild beasts, with the preternatural terror of the unknown spaces from which they issued, and the unknown powers of darkness from which they were said to have sprung, that made the approach of these Huns so paralyzing. And in Attila himself the terror was concentrated. The terror of his name and the weight of his rule, if that could be called rule which was a disorganization of all existing order, were known from the borders of China and the great Tartar desert through Hungary to Constantinople, and to the coasts of northernmost Scandinavia. Thus these demon armies had for the moment a Satanic Majesty, a Prince of the power of the air, before whose crafts and assaults the feeble diplomacy of Constantinople and Ravenna was as the innocent cunning of a child.