With regard to night attacks the Macedonians appear to have cherished similar feelings, since we find Alexander refusing to attack Darius by night on the ground that he did not wish to gain a stolen victory. And with regard to close combat, something of the old Roman and Achæan feeling was displayed in Europe when first the crossbow, and in later times the musket, rendered personal prowess of lesser importance. Before the time of Richard I., when the crossbow became the chief weapon in war, warriors, says the Abbé Velley, were so free and brave that they would only owe victory to their lance and their sword, and everybody detested those perfidious arms with which a coward under shelter was enabled to slay the bravest.[179] So said Montluc of the musket, which in 1523 had not yet, he says, superseded in France the use of the crossbow: ‘Would to God this accursed instrument had never been invented.... So many brave and valiant men would not have met their deaths at the hands very often of the greatest cowards, who would not so much as dare look at the man whom they knock down from a distance with their accursed balls.’[180] And in the same spirit Charles XII. of Sweden once bade his soldiers to come to close quarters with the enemy without shooting, on the ground that it was only for cowards to shoot. Such ideas are, of course, dead beyond the hope of recovery; but they are an odd commentary on our conceit in the improved tone of our military code of honour. We have long since learned to despise these old-world notions of honour and courage, and to make very few exceptions indeed to the newer doctrine of Christendom, that in war anything and everything is fair. But it is worth the pause of a moment to reflect that such moral sentiments in restraint of the use of fraud in war should have once had a real existence in the world; that they should once have swayed the minds of the most successful military nation that ever existed, and stood by them till they had attained that high degree of power which was theirs at the time of the Second Punic War (217-199 B.C.) In comparing the code of military honour prevalent in pagan antiquity with that of more recent times, it is but fair to remember that the pagan nations of old recognised some principles of action which were never dreamt of in the best days of Christian chivalry; and that the generals of the people who we are sometimes told were a mere robber community would have had as strong a feeling against the righteousness of a night attack, a feigned retreat, or a surprise, as our modern generals would have of an open violation of a truce or convention.