of all Germanic invasions
since Attila.

It's an engaging habit of Mother Beckett's to punctuate exciting stories
like this with little soft sighs of sympathy: but the graphic war
descriptions given by our lieutenant left her cold. Even when we came
into the town, and began to go round it in the car, she was heavily
silent, not an exclamation! And we ought to have realized that this was
strange, because Soissons nowadays is a sight to strike the heart a
hammer-blow.

Of course the place isn't older than Rheims. It's of the same time and
the same significance. But its face looks older in ruin--such features
as haven't been battered out of shape. There's the wonderful St.
Jean-des-Vignes, which should have interested the little lady, because
the great namesake of her family St. Thomas a Beckett, lived there, when
it was one of Soissons' four famous abbeys. There's the church of St.
Leger, and the grand old gates of St. Medard, to say nothing of the
cathedral itself. And then there's the history, which goes back to the
Suessiones who owned twelve towns, and had a king whose power carried
across the sea, all the way to Britain. If Mother Beckett doesn't know
much about history, she loves being in the midst of it, and hearing talk
of it. But when our Frenchman told us a story of her latest favourite,
King Clovis, she had the air of being asleep behind her thick blue veil.
It was quite a good story, too, about a gold vase and a bishop. The gold
vase had been stolen in the sack of the churches, after the battle of
Soissons, when Roman rule was ended in France. St. Remi begged Clovis to
give the vase back. But the booty was being divided, and the soldier who
had the vase refused to surrender it to a mere monarch. "You'll get what
your luck brings you, like the rest of us!" said he, striking the vase
so hard with his battle-axe that it was dented, and its beauty spoiled.
Clovis swallowed the insult, that being the day of soldiers, not of
kings: but he didn't forget; and he kept watch upon the man. A year
later, to the day, the excuse he'd waited for came. The soldier's armour
was dirty, on review; Clovis had the right as a general to reproach and
punish him, so snatching the man's battle-axe, the king crushed in the
soldier's head. "I do to you with the same weapon what you did to the
gold vase at Soissons!" he said.

It wasn't until we had seen everything, and had spent over an hour
looking at the martyred cathedral, from ev