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Nay he made the gingerbread mother a kind of prime-minister, said the angry public, justly scandalized at this of the "Dovekin." Gustavus Vasa was a young fellow there, who dexterously escaped this Bloodbath, and afterwards came to something. In Denmark and Sweden, rash Christian made ever more enemies; at length he was forced to run, and they chose another King or successive pair of Kings.
The Kammerjunker could not forget the Swedish bloodbath, the execution of Torben Oxe, and all that can be said against the unfortunate king. Otto drove him completely out of the field, in part from his enthusiasm for Christian the Second, but still more because it was the Kammerjunker with whom he was contending.
"The bloodbath of the Somme," as the Germans called it, was ours as well as theirs, and scores of times when I saw the dead bodies of our men lying strewn over those dreadful fields, after desperate and, in the end, successful attacks through the woods of death Mametz Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Bernafay Wood, High Wood, and over the Pozieres ridge to Courcellette and Martinpuich I thought of Rawlinson in his chateau in Querrieux, scheming out the battles and ordering up new masses of troops to the great assault over the bodies of their dead... Well, it is not for generals to sit down with their heads in their hands, bemoaning slaughter, or to shed tears over their maps when directing battle.
For this is the world of Gregory of Tours, of which you may read in his History of the Franks. The rule under which it lives is the rule of the horrible Merovingian kings. Side by side with the villas barbarism spreads and flourishes like a jungle growth. Learning is dying hardly the ghost of a university is left and Gregory himself who came of a great Gallo-Roman family and was a bishop bewails his ignorance of grammar. The towns are shrinking, crouched behind their defences. The synagogues are flaming, and the first step has been taken in that tragic tale of proscription and tallage, tallage and expulsion which (it seems) must never end. As to politics, the will of the leader and his retinue is the rule of the Franks, and purge and bloodbath mark every stage in the rivalry of the Merovingian princes. The worst of them are devils like Chilperic and Fredegond, the best of them are still barbarians like that King Guntram, who fills so many indulgent pages in Gregory of Tours. He is a vaguely contemporary figure, a fat, voluble man, now purring with jovial good nature, now bursting into explosions of wrath and violence, a strange mixture of bonhomie and brutality. It is an ironic commentary on what has happened to civilization that Gregory should regard him with affection, that he should be known as 'Good King Guntram' and that the church should actually have canonized him after his death. Good King Guntram; Michelet has summed him up in a phrase 'Ce bon roi
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