Attila the Hun (40 page)

For all we have and are
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!

Nor was this reaction confined to the British. The ‘Flames of Louvain’ came to symbolize the fate of ‘poor little Belgium’, and nations not yet at war were horrified. Across Europe, outrage justified prejudice and self-righteousness. From Switzerland, the French poet and soon-to-be Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, formerly rather pro-German, wrote a letter of protest to the German writer and 1912 Nobel laureate Gerhard Hauptmann, making the German–Hun analogy and asking whatever happened to the legacy of Goethe? Hauptmann, formerly critical of Prussian nationalism, replied testily that right now Germans would rather be considered the sons of Attila than the sons of Goethe, an outburst that won him a decoration in the Kaiser’s birthday honours.

The whole delicate network of treaties unravelled in two months, and once again Germans followed in Attila’s footsteps. Their Third Army advanced on the Catalaunian Plains, and once again failed to achieve the instant victory they sought. This time the British were France’s allies, and quickly adopted France’s and Kipling’s insulting analogy, as
well as the less insulting epithet Boches.
³

Kipling’s glib equation – German = Hun – became a commonplace, almost always as a generalized singular, ‘the Hun’. A quick internet search produces examples by the hundred.
War Illustrated
for 1 December 1917 entitled an article ‘The Footprints of the Hun’. Robert Lindsay Mackay of the 11th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders wrote in his diary: ‘It was apparent in many ways that the Hun meant to hold his third line but our early move where we broke in and rolled up his flanks, upset him.’

But there is something odd about the term. No-one had ever talked about Attila’s Huns as ‘the Hun’. Yet – if you rely on the literary sources – for English-speakers everywhere, ‘the Hun’ came to stand for Germany, and Germans, and German barbarism. It was a peculiarly English thing: the French did not speak of
le Hun
, although the analogy was theirs originally.
Les Boches
or
le Boche
was enough, which seems somehow more human, more in line with the German term for the English soldier, Tommy, paralleled in English by Fritz and Jerry. Neither French nor German had a term with the satanic connotations of ‘the Hun’.

You might think ‘the Hun’ was a universal English usage. Certainly the conditions were bad enough to justify its spread. When the Western Front settled into trenches, soldiers entered a nightmare in which any
atrocity seemed likely and rumour was taken as fact. Ordinary soldiers ‘knew’ that Germans boiled down corpses to make tallow, crucified prisoners in no man’s land, and fought with saw-edged bayonets, the better to rip open English bellies. As Paul Fussell writes in
The Great War and Modern Memory
, ‘Such is the desire for these bayonets to bespeak nastiness in the German character that to this day the rumour persists that they were a specific instrument of Hun nastiness.’

Yet it never caught on in the front lines. Tommy felt some familiarity with the Boches or Boche (singular), and Fritz, and Jerry, trapped like him in a horror dictated by the top brass. Sometimes, Tommy referred to ‘old Jerry’, even ‘poor old Jerry’, the ‘old’ proclaiming familiarity, even affection. Fighting men did not talk about ‘the Hun’, because they did not hate as those at home might have wished. In the play
Journey’s End
, by the ex-soldier R. C. Sherriff, the men in the trenches talk of ‘the Boche’, never ‘the Hun’. Indeed, one character remarks, ‘The Germans are really quite decent aren’t they? I mean, outside the newspapers.’

Outside the newspapers.
The term ‘Hun’ belonged to those back home with an interest in whipping up hatred, like Kipling, and official propagandists, and anti-German headline writers. E. A. Mackintosh, killed at Cambrai in November 1917, aged 24, recalled in ‘Recruiting’:

‘Lads, you’re wanted, go and help,’
On the railway carriage wall
Stuck the poster, and I thought
Of the hands that penned that call.

Fat civilians wishing they
‘Could go and fight the Hun.’
Can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over forty-one?

On Sunday, 10 November 1918, the day before the armistice, the
News of the World
proclaimed the end with
HUN SURRENDER CERTAIN
.

‘The Hun’ was of its time, and its time passed. By the early 1930s, it was slipping out of fashion and into mock-imperial speech, giving way before a greater horror, ‘the Nazis’. Hitler’s antisemitism unleashed an evil against which the beastliness of ‘the Hun’ paled into insignificance. Two books published in the 1940s –
The Hun in Africa
and
Harrying the Hun
– were last gasps. Today, the term is an archaism, used only to evoke a moment in time and its antique prejudices.

I
n Hungary, his homeland, Attila’s rise to stardom began soon after the arrival of the Hungarians, the Magyars, in 896. For the best part of a century, these warrior-nomads acted like latter-day Huns, raiding into Bulgaria, France, Italy and Germany, until the Emperor Otto I put a stop to their bandit ways on the banks of the River Lech in 955. After that, with nowhere left to migrate to and no-one weaker to raid, they settled. In the 970s the current leader, Geza, did a deal with Emperor Otto II and the pope. The deal was this: he would have himself baptized, and release all Christian slaves, in exchange for recognition as king. To seal the agreement, he betrothed his son Vaik, renamed István
(Stephen), to Gisela, daughter of the King of Bavaria, one of Otto II’s subsidiary monarchs. The clause about releasing Christian slaves was not popular with Hungarian nobles, and the place was still seething when Geza died in 997. It was young Stephen, aged 22, who finally asserted royal authority, and had himself crowned king in 1001. To mark the occasion, Pope Sylvester II sent Stephen a crown, which by tradition was worn by all Hungarian kings for the next thousand years. It (or a replica: its authenticity is debated) is on view today in the Hungarian National Museum, a glittering symbol of Hungarian and Christian stability in the heart of central Europe. Stephen went on to found ten dioceses under two archbishops and act as patron for many monasteries. Fifty years after his death in 1038 he was canonized.

The point of all this? A Hungarian, Christian, landowning nobleman in (say) 1020 would have sprung from a grandfather who had been a pagan marauder, and from great-great-grandparents who had been illiterate nomads. Not much of an identity there, nor deep roots, nor any historic claim to the land. Now, people who lack these things like to acquire them somehow, which is what the Hungarians did, looking with relief back to the people and the leader whose successes seemed so remarkably to foreshadow their own.

Very quickly, folk tales sung by bards provided three great heroes: Attila, Árpád and Stephen. Stephen back to Árpád, a mere century, was an easy link. But between Árpád and Attila was a blank of four centuries and a thousand unrecorded miles. Such a blank, though, was
a gift to poets, and quickly filled, with stories along the following lines.

When King Attila died, he left two sons. The first, Dengizich, died in battle. The second, Ernak, became known as Csaba, or Chaba (meaning ‘shepherd’, i.e. of his people). He was the son of Honoria, the Roman princess (whom Attila had married in some unexplained way). Chaba returned to Asia, leaving behind 3,000 warriors, the Szeklers, as border guards (
székel
= ‘border guard’ in Hungarian). Chaba prayed that whenever his people were in trouble Nature herself would tell him, and he would return to protect them. Twice he galloped back to save them. Years passed, and Chaba died. At long last, mighty enemies arose and threatened the Székely. Chaba returned one last time, leading an army across the starry skies to scatter the enemy. The path of the shining, ghostly army became a road in the Heavens. Hungarians call the Milky Way ‘The Way of the Souls’, and remember Chaba and his heroic father, Attila. From Chaba followed those generations during which Hun joined seamlessly with Magyar: Ugek, El
d, and then Álmos, who had his own cycle of epics, because it was he who, Moses-like, led his people back to the Carpathians, where he died, to be succeeded at last by Árpád. Now the Magyars were back in their homeland, where they formed an alliance with the Székely, who held fast to their duties as border guards; and that is why they remain to this day as a large Hungarian-speaking minority in central Romania, still claiming descent from Attila.

These tales were sung by pagan bards, who had no
place in a Christian nation, with its corps of literate monks. As the oral tradition died, a written one took its place, hijacking the old stories and retaining their nationalist agenda. In the thirteenth century, in the
Gesta Hungarorum
, an anonymous Benedictine monk repeated the claim that Attila was a direct forefather of Árpád, whose Magyar invasion over the Carpathians in 896 was nothing more than a return to land that was his anyway, thanks to Attila.
⁴
Shortly after the
Gesta
were written, the Huns suffered a brief setback as heroes, because Hungarians equated them with the Mongols, who devastated the country in 1241–2. Attila’s reputation was restored by a chronicler named Simon Kézai, who portrayed his hero surrounded by wealth; even his stables were lined with purple velvet. Thereafter, Attila remained both ancestor and hero-king. It was even believed that Attila’s sword, the Sword of Mars, had been owned by the Hungarian kings, until it was given to a German duke in 1063, who gave it to his emperor, Henry IV, who . . .

And so legends about legends could lead for ever onwards, if we let them. By the late fifteenth century Attila had become a sort of Hungarian Charlemagne, the forebear not simply of Árpád and Stephen, but of their successor, Hungary’s greatest king, Matthias Corvinus, whose courtiers praised him as the ‘second Attila’ for restoring Hungary to power and glory under a strong, centralized monarchy. Matthias revelled in the
comparison. His pet historian, the Italian Antonio Bonfini, cast Attila as a Roman and proto-Renaissance figure, inventing for him grand orations to mark the murder of Bleda and the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The comparison with Attila was not always flattering, however. One of Matthias’ critics, Callimachus, an Italian aristocrat with an abiding love of the Polish monarchy, saw him as a threat to peace in Europe and attacked Matthias-as-Attila in a biography of the Hun, presenting him as a back-stabbing, land-grabbing tyrant. But even he did not deny that Attila was a Hungarian at heart, a myth which suited the Hungarian aristocracy as well as the king. In the eighteenth century, the Ésterházys – princes of the Holy Roman Empire, Haydn’s patrons, owners of the castle known as the Hungarian Versailles – traced their proud but spurious lineage right back to Attila.

So it is not surprising that Hungarians today have a very different take on Attila from western Europeans. Nor is it an invalid one. Attila was in the end more plunderer than emperor; but he did no more than most leaders of his time would have done if they could have, namely gain as much as possible from victims and enemies. Only victory allows time and leisure for more civilized virtues to emerge; and Attila was not quite successful enough to afford them. He could have created an empire reaching from the Atlantic to the Caspian; he could have rivalled Rome at its height; his heirs could have seized Rome itself, turned on Constantinople and redirected the course of history. If he ever dimly glimpsed such a vision, he could not
focus on it, let alone achieve it, because in the end he did not control his creature: it controlled him, and it drove him to death and itself to a hasty end. His legacy is his name, his image, and the mystery of what might have been.

¹
The Royal Opera House in London did it in 2002.

²
Attila the Hun
(original title:
Attilo Flagello di Dio
), 1954, with Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren;
Attila
, made for American TV in Lithuania, 2001, with Gerard Butler as Attila, Powers Boothe as Aetius, Siân Phillips as Attila’s grandmother and Steven Berkoff as Rua (Ruga).

³
Origin unknown. One derivation is from
Alboche
, supposedly a blend of
Allemand
and
caboche
, slang for ‘head’, but also a sort of hammer and a part of the tobacco plant. More research is needed.