If Attila was bent on chastising the Visigoths it was obviously across this still Roman and Christian province of Central Gaul that he must march, and experience both in the East and the West had taught the Imperial Government that such a march meant the complete ruin, devastation and depopulation of every city on the way. The natural frontiers of Gaul upon the East were and are the Rhine and the mountains. To hold them is the safety of Gaul, to lose them is destruction. Unfortunately, the Rhine could not be held against Attila. It could not be held because the chief crossing place at Confluentes (Coblenz) was in the power of the Franks, while a secondary crossing at Augst, now a village between Bâle and Mulhouse, was in the power of the Burgundians. Those gates were flung wide, and it was through them that Attila at last entered the heart of the West. Confluentes (Coblenz) stood at the junction of the Moselle with the Rhine, and thence upon the left of the Moselle a great Roman road ran south-west to Augusta Treverorum (Treves), whence a whole series of roads set forth to traverse Gaul in every direction. From Confluentes, too, running north along the left bank of the Rhine, a road pushed on northward through Bonn to Cologne, whence again a great highway ran west and south across what is now Belgium and Picardy. This would seem to have been the main route of Attila’s advance. At the southern entry at Augst his armies could await, meet and perhaps cut off or defeat any attack from Italy. [Illustration: THE ATTACK OF ATTILA UPON GAUL AND THE RETREAT FROM ORLEANS] It was January when Attila set out, it was March when he found himself at last before the gates of Gaul upon the Rhine. The spring and summer lay all before him in which to ruin and to destroy what after all he could not understand. VI ATTILA’S ADVANCE FROM THE RHINE TO ORLEANS In the ruin of the secular Roman administration which the last fifty years had seen, in the terror which the threat of Attila’s armies upon the Rhine roused everywhere in the great and noble province of Gallia, it would appear that many, if not all, of the cities still Roman, and above all Christian, found in some constant and dominating mind a substitute for, and a successor to, their ruined institutions. We see this in Tongres, in Metz, in Rheims, in Orleans, above all we see it, as we might expect, in Paris. The fate of these cities, the way they met their fate is illuminating; and if it is inexplicable and to our scepticism almost incredible, it is none the less certainly indicative of the condition, spiritual and political, of that still Roman society. It was Christianity which defeated Attila in Gaul as certainly as it alone was able later to turn him back from the destruction of Italy. The real victory, in spite of the great strokes of Aetius, was a spiritual victory; a victory of Christianity over heathenism.