Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/321

Rh, would gladly trample beneath her feet the crenelated crown that she had been forced to wear.

History does not hesitate to justify the repugnance of the metropolis for this martial garb. Instead of preserving her, these walls and ramparts had always attracted the worst scourges toward her. Besieged for months, bombarded, then forced, invaded, pillaged, sacked, put to fire and sword, devastated from cellar to roof by foreign soldiery, notably during the Spanish Fury, so well named, she was nigh to never again recovering from it, to never rising from her ashes, but to disappearing with her fortune. But, thanks to her faithful Scheldt, which for her took the place of Pactolus and the fountain of youth, she was reborn each time more beautiful, more desirable, and recovered her ravished fortune tenfold. As she grew richer, however, she grew more surly and more selfish. Did she have a presentiment of fresh disasters? She spread out so insolent a luxury, and so much misery surrounded it! And the more her commerce flourished, the more inveterate became her hatred of these inauspicious fortifications, which not only thwarted her growth, but destined her, in case of war, to be the theater of desperate struggles and supreme disasters.

Her ramparts charged with cannon and her barracks crammed with soldiers continually evoked the spectre of ruin and death before these Crœsuses, as insolent as they were cowardly. And the city came to envelop in the same animadversion the bastions that strangled her and the idle, parasitic garrison that seemed to insult her activity, and with whom she vied even in patriotic courage. In the same way Carthage used to detest her mercenaries.

The manner in which the army was recruited did not