While the men are buckling on their armour for the coming strife, wives, sisters, sweethearts, daughters, with proud hearts, give their aid, and with busy fingers--despite the tear that will sometimes blur the vision of the gay embroidery--swiftly and deftly labour with loving care on the devices that will nerve the warriors to living steel in the shock of battle. The Queen of England, so zealously busy in her task of love, is but a type and exemplar of thousands of her sex before and since. The raven standard of the Danish invaders of Northumbria was worked by the daughters of Regnar Lodbrok, and in the great rebellion in the West of England many a gentlewoman suffered sorely in the foul and Bloody Assize for her zealous share in providing the insurgents with the standards around which they rallied. The Covenanters of Scotland, the soldiers of Garibaldi freeing Italy from the Bourbons, the levies of Kossuth in Hungary, the Poles in the deadly grip of Russia, the armies of the Confederate States in America, the Volunteers who would fain free Greece from the yoke of the Turk,[7] all fought to the death beneath the banners that fair sympathisers with them, and with their cause, placed in their hands. When two great nations, such as France and Germany, fall to blows, the whole armament, weapons, flags, and whatever else may be necessary, is supplied from the government stores according to regulation pattern, but in the case of insurgents against authority struggling--rightly or wrongly--to be free, the weapons may be scythe blades or whatever else comes first to hand, while the standards borne to the field will bear the most extraordinary devices upon them, devices that appeal powerfully at the time to those fighting beneath their folds, but which give a shudder to the purist in heraldic blazonry, as for instance, to quote but one example, the rattle-snake flag with its motto "Beware how you tread on me," adopted by the North American colonists in their struggle against the troops of George III.