Such was the return, such was the failure of Attila. He had looked to hold the world in fee; he returned for the last time across the Danube his desire unaccomplished, his hopes dead. He had struck first the East and perhaps ruined it, but he had failed to take Constantinople. He had struck Gaul and left its cities shambles, but he had not destroyed the armies of Aetius. He had desired Rome for his plunder and his pride, but Leo had turned him back before he crossed the Po. Every attack had ended in a long retreat; if he brought ruin to a hundred Imperial cities, at last he but achieved his own. He returned to his wooden stockade in the heart of Hungary with all his hopes unfulfilled, all his achievements undone, a ruined man. That he did not realise his failure is but to emphasise the fact that he was a Barbarian. To him, doubtless, destruction and booty, ruin and loot seemed the end of war, he had not even in this his last hour begun to understand what the Empire was. And so if we ask ourselves what in reality the enormous energy of the Hunnish onslaught achieved in the first half of the fifth century, we are compelled to answer, nothing; nothing, that is, consciously and directly. Unconsciously and indirectly, however, the restless brutality of Roua and of Attila brought to pass these two great and even fundamental things; it was the cause of the passing of Britain into England, and it founded the republics of the lagoons which were to produce Venice the Queen of the Adriatic. Of all this, of his failure as of those strange achievements, Attila was wholly unaware. He came home like a conqueror to his wooden palace in the midst of a great feast prepared for him, to be greeted as Priscus describes he had been greeted before, on his return from the ruin of the East and his failure to reach Constantinople. He had made the West his tributary; he was laden with the gold and the spoil of northern Italy. It was enough for him, and so he made ready with joy to marry yet another wife, to add yet one more to his concubines; not that Honoria who would have been the sign of his victory, but one rather a prey than a prize, pitiful in her youth and helpless beauty, Ildico, or as the German legends call her Hildegrude, perhaps a Frankish or a Burgundian princess. It is said, we know not with how much truth, that upon that long and last retreat as he crossed the river Lech by Augsburg an old woman with streaming hair, a witch or a sorceress, cried out to him thrice as he passed, “Retro Attila!” It is part of the legend which makes so much of his history.