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The Roman legionaries should be good judges on that point. They used to say that no armed barbarian, Goth or Vandal, Moor or Spaniard, was so terrible as the unarmed monk of the Thebaid.
Thus, their retreat was harder. But with courage unshaken, they turned their backs on the yielding door, and set their faces toward darkness and the unknown. Two of their number lay dead inside this chamber where the Legionaries now were. Nothing could be done for them; the bodies simply had to be abandoned where they lay.
In silence, save for the occasional easing of positions along the trench, the Legionaries waited. Strange dim colors appeared along the desert horizons, half visible in the gloom funeral palls of dim purple, with pale, ghostly reflections almost to mid-heaven.
He could not afford to leave behind him an open door into the Province, and he could ill spare troops for a siege. Afranius and Petreius were already over the Ebro with 30,000 legionaries and with nearly twice as many Spanish auxiliaries. Yet Marseilles must be shut in, and quickly. Fabius was sent forward to hold the passes of the Pyrenees. Caesar's soldiers were set to work in the forest.
It is not too fanciful to trace, as Harnack has done, the resemblance in detail Peter and Paul in the place of Romulus and Remus; the bishops and arch-bishops instead of the proconsuls; the troops of priests and monks as the legionaries; while the Jesuits are the Imperial bodyguard, the protectors and sometimes the masters of the sovereign.
And everywhere in the dull, flame-shot obscurity, the Legionaries ran about like ghouls in their hoods and round, hollow eye-holes; masked faces, indistinct in the smoke, loomed grotesque and horrible as Ku-Klux where the bayonets were at work digging out the enemy from blind burrows, turning them up from their bloody forms.
Nothing harder than unshod horses, than goats and sheep, and the soft pads of camels had ever worn these gleaming ways. The brush of a Verestchagin, a Gérôme, a Bida, skilled in the colors of the Orient, would have been needed to paint even an impressionistic coup d'oeil of this scene surpassing strange, now opening out before the Legionaries' eyes.
His troops were also Roman legionaries, experienced in war, but his fleet was considerably less in numbers and the individual ships much smaller than the quinqueremes and octiremes of Antony. The ships of Octavius were mostly biremes and triremes.
Here and there upon the heights they could see small bodies of legionaries who defended themselves against light troops of the enemy, until overwhelmed by the Spanish infantry that scaled the hills and cut them to pieces; while to every prayer that the dictator should march out to their support, he returned one grim answer. "They deserted their posts in the passes. Rome needs not such soldiers."
The two things together made her ground, 'stem on' to the bank; and then, of course, the heavy sea running into the bay, instead of helping her to the shore, began to break up the stern which was turned towards it. Common peril makes beasts of prey and their usual victims crouch together. Benefits received touch generous hearts. But the legionaries on board had no such sentiments.
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