Harold Godwin and William of Normandy were not strangers to each other when they drew up their battle forces on the field of Senlac-Hastings. Harold had spent some months in Normandy at the court of William some years prior to the death of Edward. And William had made known to Harold his claim to the English throne and his intention of maintaining that claim when the time should come. History relates that Harold, concealing his own ambitious designs, vowed solemnly to support William’s cause. At the death of Edward, however, Harold found himself at the head of a powerful Saxon faction and felt strong enough to oppose William, should he persist in his intent to claim the throne. But what about that oath made solemnly in the presence of the Sacrament! Is a man ever courageously self-respecting and invincibly valiant in whose soul festers the ulcer--perjury! When Richard the Third went forth to battle upon Bosworth field, he was already defeated and slain by his own avenging conscience. When Harold heard of the landing of William’s Norman troops at Pevensey, he was then in the north of England engaged in a struggle with the Danes under the leadership of his own brother Tostig. Harold was slightly wounded in this battle but, in the end, Tostig lay dead upon the field and the Danes were put to flight. Thus from a battlefield red with a brother’s blood, Harold, a wounded man and a perjured man hastened southward to his fate in the dread slaughter of Hastings. “And were things only called by their right name, Cæsar himself would be ashamed of fame.”--_Byron._ The word _battlefield_ is a euphemism for human shambles. And “the chief who in triumph advances” is, in grim reality, but the lustiest and the bloodiest of the dogs of war. And the Alexanders, Cæsars, Napoleons are the madmen who have made men mad by their contagion, and have so accumulated horrors Pelion-Ossa piled on horrors as to make the angels weep o’er this mad planet of the universe. A forceful peculiarity of mental unsoundness is the vehemence with which its victim conceives himself to be right and everybody else wrong, himself sane and all not in agreement with him insane. This fatuity is characteristic of ages as well as of individuals. It is manifest in the complaisant superiority which every age, every generation assumes toward the immediately preceding. “Back in the past, during the Dark Ages, in primitive times, etc.” are the words of balm with which the passing hour begins its own eulogy. But blood is blood and hate is hate and war is war, whether waged by Macedonian Alexander B. C. 331, or by the Balkan forces A. D. 1912. Shades of the fallen upon that age-long battle ground! wouldn’t you feel strangely at home in the fray if by any chance you should come to life today?