"I SAT DOWN HEAVILY IN HOMESICK SOLITUDE".
THE
MAID-AT-ARMS
A Novel
By
Robert W. Chambers
Illustrated by
Howard Chandler Christy
1902
TO
MISS KATHARINE HUSTED
PREFACE
After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by asuccessful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation withretrospective complacency.
Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in thepageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothlyacross the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.
Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through amirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; itsstruggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide orcover.
For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles,brutally etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--forin this land we have no haze to soften truth.
Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come atlast to victory--but what a victory! Not the familiar, graciousgoddess, wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked,desperate creature, gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to thewest.
The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloakthe flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon.
Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every mandistinct, every battle in detail.
Pangs that they suffered we suffer.
The faint-hearted who failed are judged by us as though theyfailed before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined aswe read; the traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but aliving Judas of to-day.
We remember that Ethan Allen thundered on the portal of allearthly kings at Ticonderoga; but we also remember that his hatredfor the great state of New York brought him and his men of Vermontperilously close to the mire which defiled Charles Lee and Conway,and which engulfed poor Benedict Arnold.
We follow Gates's army with painful sympathy to Saratoga, andthere we applaud a victory, but we turn from the commander incontempt, his brutal, selfish, shallow nature all revealed.
We know him. We know them all--Ledyard, who died stainless, withhis own sword murdered; Herkimer, who died because he was not braveenough to do his duty and be called a coward for doing it; Woolsey,the craven Major at the Middle Fort, stammering filthy speeches inhis terror when Sir John Johnson's rangers closed in; Poor, whothrew his life away for vanity when that life belonged to the land!Yes, we know them all--great, greater, and less great--ourgrandfather Franklin, who trotted through a perfectly cold andselfishly contemptuous French court, aged, alert, cheerful to theend; Schuyler, calm and imperturbable, watching the North, whichwas his trust, and utterly unmindful of self or of the pack yelpingat his heels; Stark, Morgan, Murphy, and Elerson, the braveriflemen; Spencer, the interpreter; Visscher, Helmer, and theStoners.
Into our horizon, too, move terrible shapes--not shadowy orlurid, but living, breathing figures, who turn their eyes on us andhold out their butcher hands: Walter