The Lying-field

The field is a terrible place, barren and desolate, for it is avoided as a spot accursed.  No living thing moves upon it; the earth is streaked with patches of dark moss and drifts of ghastly skulls, like a scattered harvest of death.  Once, says the legend, a wayfarer, surprised by the swift-fallen night, lost himself on the plain.  As he stumbled in the darkness he heard the clocks of the town near by strike the hour of midnight.  At this the stillness about the wanderer was broken.  Under his feet the earth seemed to tremble, there was a rattling of weapons, and there sounded the tramp of armed men and the tumult of battle.

Suddenly the shape of a man in armour appeared before him, terrific and menacing.

“What do you seek here, in a field that has been accursed through many centuries?” he asked.  “Do you not know that this is a place of terror and death?  Are you a stranger that you stand on the place where a king, Louis the Pious, betrayed by his own sons, was handed over to his enemies, his crown torn from his head by his own troops?  And he who would have died gladly in battle suffered the shame and dishonour that were worse than death.  He lifted up his hands to heaven and cried with bitterness:  ’There is no such thing on earth as faith and loyalty.  Accursed be sons and warriors, accursed be this field whereon such deeds have been done, accursed be they for ever!’”

The spectre paused and his words echoed across the field like the cry of a lost soul.  Again he spoke to the trembling wanderer:  “And that curse has endured through the centuries.  Under this plain in mile-wide graves we faithless warriors lie, our bones knowing no repose; and never will that curse of our betrayed king be lifted from us or this place!”

The spectral warrior sank into the gloomy earth, the tumult of fighting died away.  The wayfarer, seized with terror, stumbled blindly on in the night.

Strassburg

Strassburg, the capital of Alsace-Lorraine, is only two miles west of the Rhine.  The city is of considerable antiquity, and boasts a cathedral of great beauty, in which the work of four centuries is displayed to wonderful advantage.  By the light of the stained-glass windows the famous astronomical clock in the south transept can be descried, still containing some fragments of the horologe constructed by the mathematician Conrad Dasypodius in 1574.  This, however, does not tally with the well-known legend of the clock, which now follows.

The Clockmaker of Strassburg

There dwelt in the town of Strassburg an old clockmaker.  So wrapped up was he in his art that he seemed to live in a world of his own, quite indifferent to the customs and practices of ordinary life; he forgot his meals, forgot his sleep, cared nothing for his clothes, and would have been in evil case indeed had not his daughter Guta tended him with filial affection.  In his absent-minded fashion he was really very fond of Guta, fonder even than he was of his clocks, and that is saying not a little.