• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 23612 0

and hope we shall one day lay it aside. That missile weapon which the Italians formerly made use of both with fire and by sling was much more terrible: they called a certain kind of javelin, armed at the point with an iron three feet long, that it might pierce through and through an armed man, Phalarica, which they sometimes in the field darted by hand, sometimes from several sorts of engines for the defence of beleaguered places; the shaft being rolled round with flax, wax, rosin, oil, and other combustible matter, took fire in its flight, and lighting upon the body of a man or his target, took away all the use of arms and limbs. And yet, coming to close fight, I should think they would also damage the assailant, and that the camp being as it were planted with these flaming truncheons, would produce a common inconvenience to the whole crowd:

"Magnum stridens contorta Phalarica venit,

Fulminis acta modo."

["The Phalarica, launched like lightning, flies through

the air with a loud rushing sound."—AEneid, ix. 705.]

They had, moreover, other devices which custom made them perfect in (which seem incredible to us who have not seen them), by which they supplied the effects of our powder and shot. They darted their spears with so great force, as ofttimes to transfix two targets and two armed men at once, and pin them together. Neither was the effect of their slings less certain of execution or of shorter carriage:

["Culling round stones from the beach for their slings; and with

these practising over the waves, so as from a great distance to

throw within a very small circuit, they became able not only to

wound an enemy in the head, but hit any other part at pleasure."

—Livy, xxxviii. 29.]

Their pieces of battery had not only the execution but the thunder of our cannon also:

"Ad ictus moenium cum terribili sonitu editos,

pavor et trepidatio cepit."

["At the battery of the walls, performed with a terrible noise,

the defenders began to fear and tremble."—Idem, ibid., 5.]

The Gauls, our kinsmen in Asia, abominated these treacherous missile arms, it being their use to fight, with greater bravery, hand to hand:

["They are not so much concerned about large gashes-the bigger and

deeper the wound, the more glorious do they esteem the combat but

when they find themselves tormented by some arrow-head or bullet

lodged within, but presenting little outward show of wound,

transported with shame and anger to perish by so imperceptible a

destroyer, they fall to the ground."—-Livy, xxxviii. 21.]

A pretty description of something very like an arquebuse-shot. The ten thousand Greeks in their long and famous retreat met with a nation who very much galled them with great and strong bows, carrying arrows so long that, taking them up, one might return them back like a dart, and with them pierce a buckler and an armed man through and through. The engines, that Dionysius invented at Syracuse to shoot vast massy darts and stones of a prodigious greatness with so great impetuosity and at so great a distance, came very near to our modern inventions.

But in this discourse of horses and horsemanship, we are not to forget the pleasant posture of one Maistre Pierre Pol, a doctor of divinity, upon his mule, whom Monstrelet reports always to have ridden sideways through the streets of Paris like a woman. He says also, elsewhere, that the Gascons had terrible horses, that would wheel in their full speed, which the French, Picards, Flemings, and Brabanters looked upon as a miracle, "having never seen the like before," which are his very words.

Caesar, speaking of the Suabians: "in the charges they make on horseback," says he, "they often throw themselves off to fight on foot, having taught their horses not to stir in the meantime from the place, to which they presently run again upon occasion; and according to their custom, nothing is so unmanly and so base as to use saddles or pads, and they despise such as make use of those conveniences: insomuch that, being but a very few in number, they fear not to attack