Attila and the Huns

In these words, Claudian the poet of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Huns of the fifth century, the brood of Attila to whom the German Kaiser appealed before the whole world when he sent his brother to China to meet the Boxers: "When you meet the foe you will defeat him. No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation in virtue of which they still live in historic tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again dare even to look askance at a German." These words will never be forgotten, for they have since been translated into action not only upon the Chinese but upon the body of Europe, upon the Belgians and the people of Northern France as upon the long martyred people of Poland. That appeal to the Hun startled Europe, and yet had we remembered the history of Prussia, had we recalled the ethnology of that race we ought not to have been surprised, for the Hun and the Prussian have certainly much in common even racially, and Attila, or Etzel, as the Germans call him, has ever played his part in the Nibelungenlied and the legends of the Prussian people. We know so little of the Huns of the fifth century: who they were, whence indeed they came and whither they went, that it is impossible definitely to assert or to deny that the Prussians of to-day are their actual descendants. We must, it seems, give up the old theory which Gibbon took from De Guignes that this savage people were identical with the Hioung-nou whose ravages are recorded in the history of China; but of this at least it seems we may be sure, that they were a Turanian race, a race to which the Finns, Bulgarians and Magyars also belong as well as the Croatians and the Turks. Can we with any certainty claim that the Prussians also are of this family? Quatrefages has demonstrated that the population of the Prussias is by its ethnological origin essentially Finno-Slavian. In every respect, he asserts, and history bears him out, Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over under the pretence of a unity of race with them. Identity of language may mask this truth, but it cannot alter it, for the difference is real and fundamental.

Dettagli