vol 11.2.26
In 2010, Mike Mullins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked what he considered the country’s greatest threat to national security. He gave a curt three-word reply, “Our national debt.”
That year, the national debt owed by our treasury was $13 trillion. Today it is $40 trillion and rising. The interest expense now ominously exceeds the cost of our military.
Most Americans. poorly served by our inept education establishment, have no idea how two-thirds of Western Christendom became Islamic, don’t have any idea how, in the seventh century, a relatively small band of Islamic warriors, in a small space of time, stormed out of the Arabian desert and brutally conquered the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Persia and large portions of today’s India.
How did that happen? The answer is the Islamic plunderers found little to no resistance. The great Roman Empire of the West, formerly based in Italy, was gone. The eastern half of the Empire based in Constantinople had been exhausted by it wars with Persia and other Russian-based invaders. The Christian, Jewish and pagan cities and towns were swept away in a seventh-century holocaust, vast, innumerable numbers of people put to the sword or enslaved.
How did the Roman Empire of Caesar, Augustus, and Marcus Aurelias disappear? The answers are many. But the short answer is corruption. Although the Roman tax base was huge, too much of the money was siphoned off by corrupt officials varying levels of the bureaucracy, including men at the highest positions of power.
The empire could no longer pay for the defense of its borders. One of its longest and most vulnerable was the Rhine River which stretched from the Alps to the North Sea and divided Roman Gaul from the Germanic tribes of Eastern Europe.
On or about New Year’s Eve, in the year 406 AD, an event, never seen before or since, occurred. The Rhine froze allowing untold numbers of barbarian tribesmen to storm across and into the countryside. In about a year all of Gaul and Iberia were lost. Four years later, for the first time in 800 years, Rome was sacked. The known world was shocked.
In my book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, I depict this event in a piece of short historic fiction…
Marcus and the Frozen Rhine
Twenty-eight years after the disaster of Adrianople, Marcus was lost in his
thoughts… the frigid night was dissolving into a grey dawn. The young centurion’s
fort stood a few yards back from the beginning of a tall sandy bank that sloped
down to the water’s edge and looked across the wide Rhine River.
From his rampart, in the dim light, on the far side of the river, just beyond the
bank, Marcus could make out figures huddled around a fire.
They were draped in crudely fashioned animal skins. The men’s hair was braided and dressed in
grease. They were dirty; they stank and bellowed at each other incoherently. An
elderly troll-like woman, wrapped in filthy hides, stirred a cauldron, slicing rancid
meat and bits of roots into the concoction. The Germans gathered around the fire
were decoys; left to distract the Romans billeted in Marcus’s fort from what was
happening that morning.
Marcus craned his neck forward. In shock he saw that the river was not
flowing; it was standing still—frozen! He looked downstream and saw, off in the
distance, vast numbers of dark forms running across the solid surface of the river.
He swung his head to his left, and upstream, there too he could see even more
figures moving across the ice.
The young centurion bolted from his post and sprinted down the wooden
steps to the fort’s dirt floor. As he raced across the dark courtyard toward the
entrance to his commander’s quarters, he blew into his battle whistle, issuing
a series of three short bursts. This signaled to his regiment that an attack was
imminent and that all men were to report to their battle stations immediately. In
moments, the men of Marcus’ regiment were at their posts in full armor. To his
dismay, the commander of Marcus’ fort, along with a second regiment billeted
there, had not returned from their expedition across the river.
All that day, as the most senior officer on duty, Marcus assumed command and
walked the ramparts of his fort, making sure that each soldier knew that he was
expected to fight as if he were two men. Yet he knew that with such a small number
of defenders, even a small band of determined archers armed with “fired” arrows
could easily burn the fort down. He did not have enough men to rush outside the
compound and repulse such an attack. But the attack never came.
Under overcast skies, the ice held and the invasion continued throughout
the day until it became clear to the young centurion that the barbarians were
bypassing his fort and heading inland for soft targets and easy plunder. Each
time Marcus walked the western ramparts of the fort, he paused to survey the
rising plumes of smoke coming from the direction of the inland villages.
The following day, a bloodied survivor from Treverorum was admitted
to the fort. In his audience with Marcus, he gave Marcus the worst news of the
centurion’s life. The entire village had been raised, all the buildings burnt to the
ground, and all the inhabitants, with their possessions and livestock, taken with
the barbarians into the interior.
As he struggled to hold back the tears in front of his men, the young centurion’s
thoughts turned back to the last words he had spoken to his sister and mother,
knowing that he would never see them again.