In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our blood.  Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries of the Dark Ages.  Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more difficult to dissipate into the daylight.  But one curious fact remains about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate works of art.  Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic influence had expanded itself over our islands.  Ghosts were there perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors.  Nobody saw Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil Rhodes.  Things were either seen or said among the British which linked them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west.  They were the visions or the inventions of a mediaeval army; and a prose poet was in line with many popular rumours when he told of ghostly archers crying “Array, Array,” as in that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow.  Other tales, true or only symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off martyrologies—­St. George.  One soldier is asserted to have claimed to identify the saint because he was “on every quid.”  On the coins, St. George is a Roman soldier.

But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death.  That which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.  Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of the first German strides.  It seemed as if the forces of the ancient valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all things and survive them.  In her train moved, like moving mountains, Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if threatening to besiege the sun.  Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the new and abnormal armaments; for the soul of Germany was really expressed in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were more symbolic than her flags.  Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted that the German superiority has been in a certain thing and of a certain kind.