Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings — Volume 12 eBook

They mounted in silence; and ere they regained the army paused, by a common impulse, and looked behind.  Awful in their desolation rose the temple and the altar!  And in Hilda’s mysterious death it seemed that their last and lingering Genius,—­the Genius of the dark and fierce, the warlike and the wizard North, had expired for ever.  Yet, on the outskirt of the forest, dusk and shapeless, that witch without a name stood in the shadow, pointing towards them, with outstretched arm, in vague and denouncing menace;—­as if, come what may, all change of creed,—­be the faith ever so simple, the truth ever so bright and clear,—­there is a superstition native to that Border-land between the Visible and the Unseen, which will find its priest and its votaries, till the full and crowning splendour of Heaven shall melt every shadow from the world!

CHAPTER V.

On the broad plain between Pevensey and Hastings, Duke William had arrayed his armaments.  In the rear he had built a castle of wood, all the framework of which he had brought with him, and which was to serve as a refuge in case of retreat.  His ships he had run into deep water, and scuttled; so that the thought of return, without victory, might be banished from his miscellaneous and multitudinous force.  His outposts stretched for miles, keeping watch night and day against surprise.  The ground chosen was adapted for all the manoeuvres of a cavalry never before paralleled in England nor perhaps in the world,—­almost every horseman a knight, almost every knight fit to be a chief.  And on this space William reviewed his army, and there planned and schemed, rehearsed and re-formed, all the stratagems the great day might call forth.  But more careful, and laborious, and minute, was he in the manoeuvre of a feigned retreat.  Not ere the acting of some modern play, does the anxious manager more elaborately marshal each man, each look, each gesture, that are to form a picture on which the curtain shall fall amidst deafening plaudits than did the laborious captain appoint each man, and each movement, in his lure to a valiant foe:—­The attack of the foot, their recoil, their affected panic, their broken exclamations of despair;—­their retreat, first partial and reluctant, next seemingly hurried and complete,—­flying, but in flight carefully confused:—­then the settled watchword, the lightning rally, the rush of the cavalry from the ambush; the sweep and hem round the pursuing foe, the detachment of levelled spears to cut off the Saxon return to the main force, and the lost ground,—­were all directed by the most consummate mastership in the stage play, or upokrisis, of war, and seized by the adroitness of practised veterans.

Not now, O Harold! hast thou to contend against the rude heroes of the Norse, with their ancestral strategy unimproved!  The civilisation of Battle meets thee now!—­and all the craft of the Roman guides the manhood of the North.