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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Maid-At-Arms, by Robert W. Chambers This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Maid-At-Arms Author: Robert W. Chambers Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12279] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAID-AT-ARMS *** Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. THE MAID-AT-ARMS A Novel By Robert W. Chambers Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy 1902 TO MISS KATHARINE HUSTED PREFACE After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective complacency. Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph. Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover. For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--for in this land we have no haze to soften truth. Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to victory--but what a victory! Not the familiar, gracious goddess, wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked, desperate creature, gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to the west. The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloak the flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon. Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every man distinct, every battle in detail. Pangs that they suffered we suffer. The faint-hearted who failed are judged by us as though they failed before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined as we read; the traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but a living Judas of to-day. We remember that Ethan Allen thundered on the portal of all earthly kings at Ticonderoga; but we also remember that his hatred for the great state of New York brought him and his
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