ldren, tied with ropes,
dangling from her ankles.
The later struggles, too, between the Teuton and the Roman offer many
examples of the German woman's absolute contempt of a life which could
be preserved only in shame and servitude.
When Drusus battled with the Cherusci, Suevi, and Sigambri, it happened
that their women, besieged by the Romans in their wagon fortifications
(_Wageriburg_), instead of surrendering, desperately defended themselves
with everything that might serve as a weapon. Finally despairing, they
struck their children against the ground and hurled their dead bodies in
the face of the enemy. The most perfect model of heroic stoicism in
connection with those wars, Princess Thusnelda, whose fate we discussed
above, was only the first woman among her equals. Teutonic women in
those primitive times invariably followed their husbands to war,
carrying food and encouragement to the warriors in battle, counting
proudly the wounds of their husbands and sons, and nursing the wounded.
Through threats or entreaties they restored many a tottering battle
array, inciting the men to heroism.
CHAPTER II
THE YEARS OF THE WANDERINGS
Until the period of the migrations of the Teutons, the precursors of
which were the hapless attempts of the Cimbri and the Teutones to invade
the Roman Empire, the ancient world, as known to history, was sharply
divided into two parts: the Roman world and the world of the Barbarians.
The consequences of the invasion and infiltration of the Germanic
barbarians into the northern and western provinces of the Roman Empire
were the ethnographic combinations from which arose well-nigh all the
nations of modern Europe. It is those barbarians who created the mixture
of blood, of ideas and ideals, of institutions and customs, from which
every State of Europe was born. Their influence for good, as for evil,
was lasting and universal.
The combinations of the Teutonic races during the fourth, fifth, sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries, until the race movement came to some sort
of a standstill under the Carlovingian dynasty, were numberless. When we
consider those tribes rushing one upon another, the newcomers ever
pressing upon those before them, as waves beating upon a shore, and see
the first germs of incipient civilization overwhelmed again and again by
swift following surges of barbarity, or even savagery, when we observe
newly formed states crushed and swallowed up by opposing s
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