Hercules, the devourer of oxen. They came to devour the land, in the literal sense of the word. But the land retaliates and conquers them with fruit and wine. Their princes and armies surfeit themselves with food and drink, and die of indigestion and dysentery."
Compare with these hired and gluttonous heroes the French, that most temperate race, which was less intoxicated with its wine than by innate enthusiasm. This, indeed, was the cause of their misfortune, and so we can see how it happened that even in the middle of the fourteenth century they, by the very excess of chivalry, succumbed to the English foe. It was at Cressy where the French appear more glorious in their defeat than do the English by their victory, which they in unknightly fashion gained by employing infantry. Hitherto war had been only a great tournament of knights of equal birth ; at Cressy this romantic cavalry, this poetry, was disgracefully shot down by modern infantry, by prose in strongest disciplined order of battle yes, even cannon here appear. The grey-bearded King of Bohemia, who, blind and old, was in this battle as a vassal of France, marked well that a new era had begun, that all was at an end with chivalry, that in future the man on horseback would be beaten by the man on foot, and so said to his knights: 'I beg you most earnestly, carry me so far into the fight, that I may once more
