Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.
MACBETH.

The first faint streaks of day were scarcely visible in the east, when Catiline, glad to escape the horrors which he had endured through the dark solitude of the night watches, issued from his tent, armed at all points, and every inch a captain.

All irresolution, all doubt, all nervousness had passed away. Energy and the strong excitement of the moment had overpowered conscience; and looking on his high, haughty port, his cold hard eye, his resolute impassive face, one would have said that man, at least, never trembled at realities, far less at shadows.

But who shall say in truth, which are the shadows of this world, which the realities? Many a one, it may be, will find to his sorrow, when the great day shall come, that the hard, selfish, narrow fact, the reality after which his whole life was a chase, a struggle, is but the shadow of a shade; the unsubstantial good, the scholar's or the poet's dream, which he scorned as an empty nothing, is an immortal truth, an everlasting and immutable reality.

Catiline shook at shadows, whom not the 'substance of ten thousand soldiers armed in proof,' could move, unless it were to emulation and defiance.

Which were in truth more real, more substantial causes of dismay, those shadows which appalled him, or those realities which he despised.

Ere that sun set, upon whose rising he gazed with an eye so calm and steadfast, that question, to him at least, was solved for ever to us it is, perhaps, still a question.

But, at that moment, he thought nothing of the past, nothing of the future. The present claimed his whole undivided mind, and to the present he surrendered it, abstracted from all speculations, clear and unclouded, and pervading as an eagle's vision.

All his arrangements for the day had been made on the previous night so perfectly, that the troops were already filing out from the Praetorian gate in orderly array, and taking their ground on the little plain at the mouth of the gorge, in the order of battle which had been determined by the chiefs beforehand.

The space which he had selected whereon to receive the attack of Antonius' army, was indeed admirably chosen. It front it was so narrow, that eight cohorts, drawn up in a line ten deep, according to the Roman usage, filled it completely; behind these, the twelve remaining cohorts, which completed the force of his two legions, were arrayed in reserve in denser and more solid order, the interval between the mountains on the left, and the craggy hill on the right, which protected his flanks, being much narrower as it ascended toward the gorge in which the rebel camp was pitched.

In front of the army, there was a small plain, perfectly level, lying in an amphitheatre, as it were, of rocks and mountains, with neither thicket, brake, nor hillock to mar its smooth expanse or hinder the shock of armies, and extending perhaps half a mile toward the consular army. Below this, the ground fell off in a long abrupt and rugged declivity, somewhat exceeding a second half mile in length, with many thickets and clumps of trees on its slope, and the hillock at its foot, whereon still frowned Chaerea's cross with the gory and hideous carcase, already blackened by the frosty night wind, hanging from its rough timbers, an awful omen to that army of desperate traitors.

Beyond that hillock, the ground swelled again into a lofty ridge, facing the mouth of the gorge in which Catiline had arrayed his army, with all advantages of position, sun and wind in his favor.

The sun rose splendid and unclouded, and as his long rays streamed through the hollows in the mountain top, nothing can be conceived more wildly romantic than the mountain scene, more gorgeous and exciting than the living picture, which they illuminated.

The hoary pinnacles of the huge mountains with their crowns of thunder-splintered rocks, the eyries of innumerable birds of prey, gleaming all golden in the splendors of the dawn their long abrupt declivities, broken with crags, feathered with gray and leafless forests, and dotted here and there with masses of rich evergreens, all bathed in soft and misty light and at the base of them the mouth of the deep gorge, a gulf of massive purple shadow, through which could be descried indistinctly the lines of the deserted palisades and ramparts, whence had marched out that mass of living valor, which now was arrayed in splendid order, just where the broad rays, sweeping down the hills, dwelt in their morning glory.

Motionless they stood in their solid formation, as living statues, one mass, as it appeared, of gold and scarlet; for all their casques and shields and corslets were of bright burnished bronze, and all the cassocks of the men, and cloaks of the officers of the vivid hue, named from the flower of the pomegranate; so that, to borrow a splendid image of Xenophon describing the array of the ten thousand, the whole army lightened with brass, and bloomed with crimson.

And now, from the camp in the rear a splendid train came sweeping at full speed, with waving crests of crimson horse-hair dancing above their gleaming helmets, and a broad banner fluttering in the air, under the well-known silver eagle, the tutelar bird of Marius, the God of the arch-traitor's sacrilegious worship.

Armed in bright steel, these were the body guard of Catiline, three hundred chosen veterans, the clients of his own and the Cornelian houses, men steeped to the lips in infamy and crime, soldiers of fifty victories, Sylla's atrocious colonists.

Mounted on splendid Thracian chargers, with Catiline at their head, enthroned like a conquering king on his superb black Erebus, they came sweeping at full gallop through the intervals of the foot, and, as they reached the front of the array, wheeled up at once into a long single line, facing their infantry, and at a single wafture of their leader's hand, halted all like a single man.

Then riding forward at a foot's pace into the interval between the horse and foot, Catiline passed along the whole line from end to end, surveying every man, and taking in with his rapid and instinctive glance, every minute detail in silence.

At the right wing, which Manlius commanded, he paused a moment or two, and spoke eagerly but shortly to his subordinate; but when he reached the extreme left he merely nodded his approbation to the Florentine, crying aloud in his deep tones the one word, “Remember!”

Then gallopping back at the top of his horse's speed to the eagle which stood in front of the centre, he checked black Erebus so suddenly that he reared bolt upright and stood for a second's space pawing the vacant air, uncertain if he could recover that rude impulse. But the rare horsemanship of Catiline prevailed, and horse and man stood statue-like and immoveable.

Then, pitching his voice so high and clear that every man of that dense host could hear and follow him, he burst abruptly into the spirited and stirring speech which has been preserved complete by the most elegant(15) of Roman writers.

“Soldiers, I hold it an established fact, that words cannot give valor that a weak army cannot be made strong, nor a coward army brave, by any speech of their commander. How much audacity is given to each man's spirit, by nature, or by habit, so much will be displayed in battle. Whom neither glory nor peril can excite, you shall exhort in vain. Terror deafens the ears of his intellect. I have convoked you, therefore, not to exhort, but to admonish you in brief, and to inform you of the causes of my counsel. Soldiers, you all well know how terrible a disaster the cowardice and sloth of Lentulus brought on himself and us; and how, expecting reinforcements from the city, I was hindered from marching into Gaul. Now I would have you understand, all equally with me, in what condition we are placed. The armies of our enemy, two in number, one from the city, the other from the side of Gaul, are pressing hard upon us. In this place, were it our interest to do so, we can hold out no longer, the scarcity of corn and forage forbid that. Whithersoever we desire to go, our path must be opened by the sword. Wherefore I warn you that you be of a bold and ready spirit; and, when the battle have commenced, that ye remember this, that in your own right hand ye carry wealth, honor, glory, moreover liberty and your country. Victorious, all things are safe to us, supplies in abundance shall be ours, the colonies and free boroughs will open their gates to us. Failing, through cowardice, these self-same things will become hostile to us. Not any place nor any friend shall protect him, whom his own arms have not protected. However, soldiers, the same necessity doth not actuate us and our enemies. We fight for our country, our liberty, our life! To them it is supererogatory to do battle for the power of a few nobles. Wherefore, fall on with the greater boldness, mindful of your own valor. We might all of us, have passed our lives in utter infamy as exiles; a few of you, stripped of your property, might still have dwelt in Rome, coveting that of your neighbors. Because these things appeared too base and foul for men's endurance, you resolved upon this career. If you would quit it, you must perforce be bold. No one, except victorious, hath ever exchanged war for peace. Since to expect safety from flight, when you have turned away from the foe, that armor which defends the body, is indeed madness. Always in battle to who most fears, there is most peril. Valor stands as a wall to shield its possessor. Soldiers, when I consider you, and recall to mind your deeds, great hopes of victory possess me. Your spirit, age, and valor, give me confidence; moreover that necessity of conquest, which renders even cowards brave. As for the numbers of the enemy, the defiles will not permit them to surround you. And yet, should Fortune prove jealous of your valor, beware that ye lose not your lives unavenged; beware that, being captured, ye be not rather butchered like sheep, than slain fighting like men, and leaving to your foes a victory of blood and lamentation.”

He ceased, and what a shout went up, seeming to shake the earth-fast hill, scaring the eagles from their high nests, and rolling in long echoes, like reverberated thunder among the resounding hills. Twice, thrice, that soul fraught acclamation pealed up to heaven, sure token of resolution unto death, in the hardened hearts of that desperate banditti.

Catiline drank delighted inspiration from the sound, and cried in triumphant tones:

“Enough! your shout is prophetic! Soldiers, already we have conquered!”

Then leaping from his charger to the ground, he turned to his body-guard, exclaiming,

“To fight, my friends, we have no need of horses; to fly we desire them not! On foot we must conquer, or on foot die! In all events, our peril as our hope must be equal. Dismount then, all of ye, and leading your chargers to the rear slay them; so shall we all run equal in this race of death or glory!”

And, with the word, leading his superb horse through the intervals between the cohorts of the foot, he drew his heavy sword, and smote him one tremendous blow which clove through spine and muscle, through artery and vein and gullet, severing the beauteous head from the graceful and swanlike neck, and hurling the noble animal to the earth a motionless and quivering mass.

It was most characteristic of the ruthless and brutal temper of that parricidal monster, that he cut down the noble animal which had so long and so gallantly borne him, which had saved his life more than once by its speed and courage, which followed him, fed from his hand, obeyed his voice, like a dog, almost like a child, without the slightest show of pity or compunction.

Many bad, cruel, savage-hearted men, ruthless to their own fellows, have proved themselves not devoid altogether of humanity by their love to some faithful animal, but it would seem that this most atrocious of mankind lacked even the “one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.”

He killed his favorite horse, the only friend, perhaps, that he possessed on earth, not only unreluctant, but with a sort of savage glee, and a sneering jest

“If things go ill with us to day, I shall be fitly horsed on Erebus, by Hades!”

Then, hurrying to the van, he took post with his three hundred, and all the picked centurions and veterans of the reserve, mustered beneath the famous Cimbric Eagle, in the centre of the first rank, prepared to play out to the last his desperate and deadly game, the ablest chief, and the most daring soldier, that ever buckled blade for parricide and treason.