Upon the following morning, the week having been full of thunder, the first rude cavalry of the Huns began to enter the city through the broken gates. The pillage and massacre and rape began, and, as to-day in Belgium, we read with a certain order and system. Nothing was spared, neither the houses of the citizens, nor their holy places, neither age nor sex. It seemed as though all would perish in a vast and systematic vandalism and murder. Suddenly a cry rose over the noise of the butchery and destruction. The Eagles! The Eagles! And over the mighty bridge that spans the Loire thundered the cavalry of Rome, and the tumultuous standards of the Goths. They came on; nothing might stop them. Step by step they won the bridge head, they fought upon the shore, in the water, through the gates. Street by street, fighting every yard, the Imperial troops pushed on, the glistening eagles high overhead. House by house, alley by alleyway was won and filled with the dead; the Huns broke and fled, the horses stamped out their faces in the byways, in the thoroughfares there was no going, the Barbarian carrion was piled so high; Attila himself was afraid. He sounded the retreat. That famous and everlasting day was the 14th of June, for Aetius had kept his word. Orleans had begun the deliverance of Gaul and of the West. VII THE RETREAT OF ATTILA AND THE BATTLE OF THE CATALAUNIAN PLAINS The retreat of Attila from Orleans would seem to have been one of the most terrible of which we have any record. The Gothic chronicler Jornandes, writing a hundred years after the events he describes, wholly or almost wholly at the mercy of a Gothic and so a Barbarian legend, would seem, though poorly informed as to facts and details, to be fully justified in the general impression he gives of the horror and disaster which befell the Hunnish host. It is certain that Attila’s withdrawal of his army must have been not only difficult but impossible without disaster: too many and too brutal crimes had been committed for the ruined population of northern Gaul to permit it an easy passage in retreat. The devastated country could no longer supply its needs, everywhere ruined men awaited revenge: it can have been little less than a confused flight that Attila made with his thousands towards the Rhine, with Aetius and Theodoric ever upon his flanks.