Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/466

460 == A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. ==

soldier of fortune is one of the most picturesque figures in the strange and shifting panorama, so full of brilliant colours and effective groupings, of the middle ages. A general who changes his colours as he changes his boots – whose services and those of his mail-clad rovers are at the disposition of whoever can pay the highest price, and whose passage from one side to another decides the fortune perhaps of a generation, the triumph of a cause, the rise or downfall of a race, without interesting himself more than they interest the horse he rides – is not a character which attracts the reader so late in the history of the world as we are, and used to national wars and national causes of a very different kind. But in medieval Italy the position of the mercenary was one which involved no such serious issues as might exist nowadays, could we conceive the possibility of a wandering army ready to take part on either side according to the inducements held out to them. The existence of such a body now would be practically impossible, however; and even the suggestion is so inconsistent with all the facts of modern life, that we can attempt no illustration of it by anything we know. An Arab tribe drawn from the standards of the Madhi to assist our advance, would at least be, after a sort, fighting for (or against)

"The ashes of their fathers And the temples of their gods."

But the condottiero of the fifteenth century had neither fathers nor altars, save perhaps in some far-off village which was not in the struggle, and was free to turn his hand against any man, with the reassuring conviction that, whoever was the master, his own interests would come to no harm.

The system was never one that flourished in England. Yet it was not unknown even in our island. Who does not remember the gay De Bracy, whose free-lances helped to keep the Saxons under in the days of Ivanhoe? And our history is not without more trustworthy records of bands whose hire gave importance to a popular rising or swelled the ranks of civil war. And England and Scotland both contributed to the number of those stout fighting-men, superabundant at home, who found a field for their prowess in the perpetual conflicts always going on on the Continent. Dugald Dalgetty served Gustavus Adolphus and the Emperor by turns with a noble impartiality; and many a ballad records the fate of a romantic Roland or a stubborn John who went "to seek his fortune in the Hie Germanic." It might afford an outlet for the surplus forces of athletic young gentlemen whom it is so difficult to know how to dispose of, were the old custom resuscitated like so many others. A Devil's Own Company of briefless barristers, a brigade of free-lances recruited at the universities, might then be fit for honourable use wherever wanted; and with a succession of wars on our hands such as we have, and seem likely to have, the institution might be a most useful one. A Gordon regiment, for instance – what finer memorial to the dead hero! – not to be hired out to President Grévy or Prince Bismarck indeed, which might perhaps be