Page:The sentiment of the Sword.djvu/14

 , as we know it, had scarcely crowned the travail of creation and produced a man when man rose up and slew his brother. That first killing must have been some uncleanly business, with a boulder clenched in an angry fist. It must have taken very little time to discover that other men were better slain with some more elongated instrument. At first the flint that flaked so easily into a fatal shape was bound with deers' sinews to a wooden shaft. Then Earth gave up her secrets at the call of Death, and with bronze and iron the forge of Tubal Cain's descendants set to work at weapons. Leaves, or tall fronds of water plants, were instant models for the prehistoric sword. The falchion that Achilles wielded flashes its primeval origin. The strong blade of the Roman legionary warred down the world with trenchant edge and thirsting point until the hordes out of the ancient East swept over Europe better armed. Against the scimitar of the Moslems, the long, straight Norman sword hewed out its path to Palestine and reigned, in turn, as Death's best sceptre from Scandinavian fiords to the Sicilian seas. By war man smote his way to freedom,

By the sword he held his blood-stained fief until the age of chivalry was overpast, until the mailed knight vanished at the first whiff of Friar Bacon's villainous saltpetre, and gun- powder, which choked Don Quixote's dream, produced the art of fence. The days had passed when, in a clear air, hand to hand, the lines of warriors met and grappled; when every wound showed gaping red, and every hand that dealt it reddened; when armoured cohorts, irresistible, charged by sheer weight through legions of the lesser sort, and trampled, hacked, and hewed them into lifelessness. Now missiles came from far through murky tracts of smoke-stained mist, belched from some iron artifice, like blasts of Tophet, and in their path was death that no cuirass, no carapace of armour could withstand. So the one excuse for a complete protection of the body vanished, and from the crowd of ancient armour-cracking weapons, mace, hammer, flail, and such like, the sword rose paramount. More lightly clad, the horseman could ride swifter, move his limbs with greater freedom. The joints in his harness expanded into gaps. One by one his metal shields dropped off, and, as he