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The Jutes came first as an advance-guard of the great Teuton invasion. It was but the prologue to the play when Hengist and Horsa, in 449 A.D., occupied what is now Kent, in the Southeast extremity of England. Covetous of each other's possessions, these Teutons fought as brothers will. Exterminating the Britons was diversified with efforts to exterminate one another.
To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic" race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations.
Serbia had successfully held the gate of the Balkans against Austria: Rumania's intervention would extend the lines of possible attack, Greece inclined in the same direction, and the forcing of the Dardanelles would assuredly have deterred Bulgaria from hostile intervention, and almost certainly have decided her to join a common Balkan move against the Teutons and the Turks.
Or did no captive, escaped by miracle from the butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his countrymen how all the rest had died like German men; and call on them to rise and avenge their brothers' blood? Yes, surely the Teutons knew well, even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard, the great city and all its glory.
Men who were of middle age at the time of Caesar's consulship could still remember the terrors which had been caused by the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons. Marius had saved Italy then from destruction, as it were, by the hair of its head. The annihilation of those hordes had given Rome a passing respite. But fresh generations had grown up. Fresh multitudes were streaming out of the North.
The souvenir of the old Roman Empire provided the scheme of its political ideas; and the Holy Roman Empire, if a religious consecration had given it a new sanctity, was Roman still. Yet the irruption of the Teutons into the Empire had left its mark; and the emperor of the Middle Ages was always of Teutonic stock.
And as he thus waxed in years and valour he beheld the perfect beauty of Alfhild, daughter of the King of the Saxons, sued for her hand, and, for her sake, in the sight of the armies of the Teutons and the Danes, challenged and fought with Skat, governor of Allemannia, and a suitor for the same maiden; whom he slew, afterwards crushing the whole nation of the Allemannians, and forcing them to pay tribute, they being subjugated by the death of their captain.
It is as old, in its essentials, as the time when not only all the Teutons formed one tribe, but when Teutons and Scandinavians were still united and when that was, who dare say?
It stretches far back into the past, and may even be recognised in some quarters at the present day. As with civilisation so with religion. The early faith of the Slavs, the Celts, and the Teutons is now generally regarded as best representing that of the Aryans.
When the ball bounced prodigiously as a result of being dropped from such a height, the Teutons thought it was some new kind of death dealer, and remained in their places of safety. In fact, they remained there quite a few minutes after the football had ceased to bounce.
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