Things were either seen or said among the British which linked them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west.

They were the visions or the inventions of a mediaeval army; and a prose poet was in line with many popular rumours when he told of ghostly archers crying "Array, Array," as in that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow.

Other tales, true or only symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off martyrologies--St.George.

One soldier is asserted to have claimed to identify the saint because he was "on every quid." On the coins, St.
George is a Roman soldier.
But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death.

That which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.
Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of the first German strides.