Who, for example, will not endorse the verdict of all ages on the conduct of those Spartans at Thermopylae, when they sat “combing their yellow hair for death” on the sea-shore?  They devoted themselves to hopeless destruction:  but why?  They felt—­I must believe that, for they behaved as if they felt—­that on them the destinies of the Western World might hang; that they were in the forefront of the battle between civilisation and barbarism, between freedom and despotism; and that they must teach that vast mob of Persian slaves, whom the officers of the Great King were driving with whips up to their lance-points, that the spirit of the old heroes was not dead; and that the Greek, even in defeat and death, was a mightier and a nobler man than they.  And they did their work.  They produced, if you will, a “moral” effect, which has lasted even to this very day.  They struck terror into the heart, not only of the Persian host, but of the whole Persian empire.  They made the event of that war certain, and the victories of Salamis and Plataea comparatively easy.  They made Alexander’s conquest of the East, 150 years afterwards, not only possible at all, but permanent when it came; and thus helped to determine the future civilisation of the whole world.

They did not, of course, foresee all this.  No great or inspired man can foresee all the consequences of his deeds:  but these men were, as I hold, inspired to see somewhat at least of the mighty stake for which they played; and to count their lives worthless, if Sparta had sent them thither to help in that great game.

Or shall we refuse the name of heroic to those three German cavalry regiments who, in the battle of Mars La Tour, were bidden to hurl themselves upon the chassepots and mitrailleuses of the unbroken French infantry, and went to almost certain death, over the corpses of their comrades, on and in and through, reeling man over horse, horse over man, and clung like bull-dogs to their work, and would hardly leave, even at the bugle-call, till in one regiment thirteen officers out of nineteen were killed or wounded?  And why?

Because the French army must be stopped, if it were but for a quarter of an hour.  A respite must be gained for the exhausted Third Corps.  And how much might be done, even in a quarter of an hour, by men who knew when, and where, and why to die.  Who will refuse the name of heroes to these men?  And yet they, probably, would have utterly declined the honour.  They had but done that which was in the bond.  They were but obeying orders after all.  As Miss Yonge well says of all heroic persons—­“‘I have but done that which it was my duty to do,’ is the natural answer of those capable of such actions.  They have been constrained to them by duty or pity; have never deemed it possible to act otherwise; and did not once think of themselves in the matter at all.”