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It is, however, at least a tribute to his personal humanity that he was not unmoved by the piteous fate of the women and children, whom helpless, homeless and deserted he left behind to shift for themselves. As Willard, his men and their prisoners marched away the cries and the sobs of the women and the children - the age old lamentations of women and of children, whose sires, husbands, sons and brothers were being taken from them - fell upon their ears. How much greater would have been Willard’s distress, if he could have foreseen that twenty years hence, in the strange whirligig of time, their fate was to be his fate! But to Willard was not given the gift of prophecy and he could not know that the time was to come, when the very men he was now leading were to rise up against him; that from his own countrymen he was to suffer "man’s inhumanity to man," and like the French he now herded before him, he was destined to be an exile from his native land, and to live and to die near a lonely river and a bay of a Country then unknown to him. Perhaps even in this day, with all its anguish and its destruction, he may have had a thought of his happy Lancaster and his looked-for return and then of days of quiet peace among those whom he loved and who loved him. Willard probably did not know his Shakespeare, but if he did how appropriate in after years he would have thought the words of Macbeth as he hesitated to slay the sleeping Duncan:
*Macbeth Act I, Scene VII Back |
