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). CHAPTER VI. CHALONS If, in the battle of Chalons, Attila and his Huns had been victorious over the combined forces of the semi-Christianized Visigoths under Theoderic and the Romans under Ætius--then Hungvari influence rather than Teutonic would have dominantly determined the progress of the civilized world. Rome had fallen: effete in her withered hand lay the rod of empire: and swarming about her, now quarrelling among themselves and with her, now fraternizing, but always more or less in awe of her prostrate majesty were her barbarous children--Franks, Burgundians, Alans, Lombards, Gauls, Alemanni, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths. These had known Rome in the hour of her pride and power; they revered the Rome that was for the sake of the Rome that had been; they had imbibed something of her culture, her military discipline, her laws, her religion. Semi-civilized, semi-Christianized, with the bold Teutonic virtues yet pristine from the Black Forests of Germany,--they were the possible material of an excellence surpassing that of Rome, even when Rome could boast of excellence.