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Henry, driven to despair, concentrated his forces upon a single point, and prepared to give battle, determined to conquer or die. But here, again, the peaceful spirit of the Church interfered to prevent a scene of carnage, by withholding the Apostolical suffrage from the nominee to the imperial dignity.
Napoleon was, however, a soldier after all much else as well, but a soldier first and foremost; and so was Decaen. When the general returned to France, his Imperial master had urgent need for stern, stubborn, fighting men of his type.
The end was to be brutal: a charge or two of devoted men, a crush at the narrow gates, a white flag, a brusque gesture from Bismarck, nothing more except a "guard of honour," an imperial special train, and Belgian newsboys shrieking along the station platform, "Extra! Fall of the Empire! Paris proclaims the Republic! Flight of the Empress! Extra!"
Whilst these dreams of ambition were being seriously presented to the unhappy Imperial Court of Vienna, the Turks, to the number of 300,000 men, had swept across Hungary like a torrent. They arrived before the capital of the Empire of Germany just at the moment when the Court had left it. They immediately invested this panic-stricken town, and the inhabitants of Vienna believed themselves lost.
The Witana-gemot was assembled in the great hall of Westminster in all its imperial pomp. It was on his throne that the King sate now and it was the sword that was in his right hand. Some seated below, and some standing beside, the throne, were the officers of the Basileus of Britain.
Remembering the atrocities and horrors committed in Natal on the advance of the Imperial troops, they awaited the coming of the English with the greatest terror.
The President of the Republic spoke of it to the King of the Belgians, and the French Minister at Brussels has spontaneously renewed the assurance to the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs to-day. From the German Government the reply was: The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs could not possibly give an answer before consulting the Emperor and the Imperial Chancellor.
Whenever he closed his eyes in short and interrupted slumbers, his mind was agitated with painful anxiety; nor can it be thought surprising, that the Genius of the empire should once more appear before him, covering with a funeral veil his head, and his horn of abundance, and slowly retiring from the Imperial tent.
The conception is entirely worthy of that Imperial levity with which the war began. But the madcap menace of the French Empire cannot be the measure of German justice. It is for Germany to show, that, notwithstanding this wildness, she knows how to be just. Dismemberment on this account would be only another form of retaliation; but retaliation is barbarous.
In the protracted contest of 1260 years with this imperial power, "the patience and the faith of the saints" were exemplified. Faith and patience would be more severely tried in this case than in any other; as the period of persecution was to be of much longer continuance than any that had preceded since the beginning of the world.
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