In John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a distinguished American politician named Ransom Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart, is asked by a group of newspapermen to recount the story of how the frontier town of Shinbone was saved 25 years earlier from the predations of the outlaw Liberty Valance. Stoddard—a former governor, senator, and ambassador to the Court of St. James, now being tipped for vice president—suddenly confesses that he didn’t fire the shot that killed the notorious gunslinger, as everyone believed he had. Rather it was his friend Tom Doniphon, a local rancher who was also his rival for Stoddard’s fiancée’s hand, who shot Valance from the shadows because he knew the mild-mannered lawyer would have no chance against a ruthless killer.

With the interview that could destroy Stoddard’s political career completed, one of the reporters stands, recounts Stoddard’s exemplary career—and then tears up his notes. “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” asks Stoddard. “No, sir,” replies Scott. “This is the West, sir: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Among the most famous Western last stands in history—that of the brave Christian knight Roland and his men at the Roncevaux Pass—is one that is entirely untrue in its most important particular. Granted, it occurred during Charlemagne’s return from his campaign against the Moors in Spain, and it seems likely that the emperor’s rear guard, which included a historically obscure knight named Roland, was indeed wiped out in 778 A.D. during an ambush in the Pyrenees, most likely by Basque tribesmen angered over the destruction of their city of Pamplona. And yet, this relative footnote to medieval history was transformed some three centuries later (c. 1040–1115) into one of the cornerstones of French literature and, as the Crusades were getting underway, into the French national epic and the foundational artistic treatment of the conflict between Islam and Christianity. The Basque Gascones (or Wascones) became the Saracens, thus blending the historical setting of the battle with the fervor of European Christianity after Pope Urban II’s rousing call at Clermont on November 27, 1095, to assist the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople in its battle against the Seljuk Turks, to protect the Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, and to reclaim the Holy Land for Christendom.

If Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships, Urban’s speech, which has come down to us in multiple versions, was the event that set in motion one of the most extraordinary logistical and military feats in history. A warring collection of various European dukes and princelings raised and transported an army from modern-day France and Germany, marched or sailed it across the known world, and, in just three years, conquered Jerusalem and established Crusader states in the Levant that would survive for almost two hundred years. The high-water mark of the Church Militant, the Crusades forged the nation-states of Europe, stymied Islamic expansionism for nearly four hundred years, and drew the rough, if often contested, borders between Christendom and the ummah to this day.

A taste of Urban’s speech, in the transcription of one Robert the Monk¹:

Oh, race of Franks, race from across the mountains, race chosen and beloved by God as shines forth in very many of your works set apart from all nations by the situation of your country, as well as by your Catholic faith and the honor of the holy church! To you our discourse is addressed and for you our exhortation is intended. We wish you to know what a grievous cause has led us to your country, what peril threatening you and all the faithful has brought us. From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempt to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and deprived of territory so vast in extent that it cannot be traversed in a march of two months. On whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory incumbent, if not upon you? You, upon whom above other nations God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great courage, bodily activity, and strength to humble the hairy scalp of those who resist you. Let the deeds of your ancestors move you and incite your minds to manly achievements … ²

Few saw this coming. As the English historian Steven Runciman notes in the opening section of his magisterial three-volume A History of the Crusades, despite the ongoing battles between the Byzantines, the Persians, and, later, the Fatamid Arabs who had conquered Jerusalem, “in the middle of the eleventh century the lot of the Christians in Palestine had seldom been so pleasant. The Moslem authorities were lenient; the [Byzantine] Emperor was watchful of their interest. Trade was prospering and increasing with the Christian countries overseas. And never before had Jerusalem enjoyed so plentifully the sympathy and the wealth that were brought to it by pilgrims from the West.”

This state of affairs was due largely to Byzantine military and cultural potency, with the imperial capital of Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, the most important city of the West. But succession troubles—the Achilles’s heel of monarchies—were hollowing out the empire, and it began shedding pieces of territory not only to Islam but to lackland Normans invading from the north as well. The Normans, the bastard sons of the Vikings, had conquered much of Italy and wrested back Sicily from Muslim hands. Worse, there was pressure from the east, from the Turks, who had been converted to Islam in the tenth century and conquered much of central Asia and Persia, which worried both Byzantines and Arabs.

In 1071, the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes led a polyglot army eastward to attempt the re-conquest of Christian Armenia from the Turks.³ On the road to Manzikert, he was ambushed by the brilliant Seljuk Turkish commander, Alp Arslan. Romanus’s mercenaries, which included Turks, Franks, and Normans, deserted him. The Byzantines were decisively defeated, and the wounded Romanus was taken prisoner. Ransomed by the Byzantines, he was soon enough deposed, blinded, and exiled to the island of Proti in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople, where he died.

Manzikert was the effective end of Byzantine regional hegemony; their great capital city was now ripe for conquest, whether from the west or the east. The Turks began the process of rolling back the Byzantines from Asia Minor, thus creating the territorial foundation of modern Turkey, which meant the Byzantines could no longer protect the Christians of the Holy Land. Pilgrims traversing Anatolia, the seat of early Christianity, who had once enjoyed relatively free passage, found themselves under assault, caught in the struggle among Byzantines, Turks, and Fatamid Egyptian Muslims.

This, then, was the geopolitical context of Urban’s mighty speech just 24 years later. And yet the call to militancy posed a problem for the faithful. As Runciman put it, “The Christian citizen has a fundamental problem to face: is he entitled to fight for his country? His religion is a religion of peace; and war means slaughter and destruction. The earlier Christian Fathers had no doubts. To them a war was wholesale murder. But after the triumph of the Cross, after the Empire had become Christendom, ought not its citizens to be ready to take arms for its welfare?”⁴

The answer was yes, and thus a thousand years of Western military inventiveness and, later, supremacy was born. The Byzantines regarded warfare as a necessary evil and a poor substitute for diplomacy, but the rude men of Europe who responded to the pope’s call almost immediately took on the fervid hallmarks of the Muslim holy warriors. After all, as far back as the fifth century, St. Augustine had outlined the conditions for a Christian “just war” in The City of God. “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

And so the French-born Urban, having finally won his struggle in Rome against the antipope Clement III with the help of King Henry IV, was visited at the Council of Piacenza in March of 1095 by a Byzantine ambassador, requesting aid from the Christian West in repelling the advance of the Turks into the historically Christian lands of Anatolia. At the Council of Clermont that November, therefore, he issued his public call to action. A chance for adventure, plunder, and lands of one’s own, plus a complete remission of sins if you were killed in battle—what was not to like?

Even at the reserve of nearly a millennium, it is impossible to overstate the effect the pope’s words had on the assembled listeners. The Europe that Charlemagne (a Frankish German, whose mother tongue was German, despite his place in French history⁵) forged from the ruins of Rome had become the Holy Roman Empire⁶; indeed Charlemagne himself had been crowned “Emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III in the year 800. At the same time, the fledgling French and Spanish languages were beginning their evolution from Latin into their modern counterparts, often through the medium of popular literature derived from songs and legends. In France, these took the form of the chansons de geste—“songs of heroic deeds”—which themselves had evolved from the oral traditions of the jongleurs and then codified in written form; in Spain, the outstanding example of the form is the twelfth-century The Poem of the Cid, which deals directly with the Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims as well. These texts (generally sung to music) in turn became the foundational texts of the French and Spanish states, shaping their national characters.⁷

The Song of Roland, the first surviving work written in Old French, is the best-known segment of the so-called Carolingian Cycle of literature revolving around Charlemagne, a literary work known as “the Matter of France.” (There are also “Matters” of Britain—the Arthurian tales—and of classical Rome, thus emphasizing the unity of European history.) Like the other chansons, and as its name implies, it was originally sung by a jongleur, accompanied on a medieval fiddle called a vielle. As we might say today, it was a smash hit, almost immediately becoming part of the French patrimony, where it remained for centuries. Indeed, it became required reading in French schools following the Franco-Prussian War (which France lost), to much esprit de corps but little martial avail.

The plot of this epic is simple but effective: the Breton knight Roland, together with his best friend, Oliver (to whose fair sister, Alda, Roland is engaged), a group of ten other noble Companions, and 20,000 Frankish warriors are assigned to bring up the rear as Charlemagne—Karl der Grosse to the Germans—conducts his main force back to Aix from his wars against the Umayyad Muslims occupying Spain.⁸ Betrayed by the evil Ganelon, Roland’s stepfather, they are ambushed by a Muslim force headed by King Marsile. Roland, Oliver, and the fighting Bishop Turpin hold out to the end, but it’s no use: they’re overwhelmed.

Charlemagne returns with aid, but too late. Marsile, who has lost his right hand in combat with Roland, is routed and dies of his wound, but not before he summons help from the Emir Baligant of Babylon. In a battle royale, Baligant is personally killed by Charlemagne, who captures Saragossa and returns to Aix with Bramimonde, Marsile’s widow, who converts to the True Faith. Ganelon is tried for treason and is almost acquitted—he pleads self-defense, since Roland had originally suggested him as leader of the rear guard, which he felt was a trap—when the issue is decided via trial by combat. An unprepossessing knight, Thierry, challenges Ganelon’s henchman, the ferocious Pinabel, to a duel, in which Pinabel is miraculously killed. The guilty Ganelon is executed by quartering, his four limbs tied to horses and his body yanked apart. Thirty members of his family are hanged.

What makes La Chanson de Roland more than simply a revenge tale, however, is the moral complexity at its center: for, truth to tell, Roland is not a particularly attractive hero. Through his pride and stubbornness, he gets himself and all his men killed thanks to his adamant refusal to sound his famous horn, the oliphant, to summon help from Charlemagne, insisting that to call for assistance would be tantamount to cowardice. Not only does he prefer death before dishonor, he wills it. Roland would rather rely on his noble steed, Veillantif, and his trusty sword, Durendal, to kill as many Muslims as he can, than evince fear. His friend Oliver begs him to call for help, but not until it’s too late does Roland finally relent, sounding the oliphant so lustily that is bursts a vein in his head, and he dies, surrounded by the bodies of his friends.⁹

Told that the pagans are on their way to attack him, Roland seems to welcome the coming fight. In laisse (stanza) 81, we read:

The noise is great and the French heard it.

Oliver said: “Companion, sir, I believe

We may have a battle with the Saracens on our hands.”

Roland replies: “May God grant it to us!

We must make a stand here for our king:

One must suffer hardships for one’s lord

And endure great heat and great cold,

One must also lose hide and hair.

Now let each see to it that he employ great blows,

So that no taunting song be sung about us!

Pagans are in the wrong and Christians are in the right.

I shall never be cited as a bad example.”10

—translation by Gerard J. Brault

As the Saracens approach, Turpin, the archbishop of Rheims, promises them martyrdom in the sight of God should they die in battle, blesses them, and absolves them of their sins. Turpin is the archetype of the warrior monk,¹¹ as extreme as Roland in his desire for glory and his loathing of cowardice. As it becomes clear to the French troops just how dire their situation is, they implore the bishop to summon help, but he sides with Roland: “My lord barons, don’t harbor base thoughts! For God’s sake I beg you not to flee, so that no worthy individual sing bad songs about it. It is much better that we should die fighting.”

Both Franks and Musselmen understand that this is an existential fight to the death, and that no quarter will be given. As the unknown poet observes, “Anyone who knows no prisoners will ever be taken puts up a stout resistance in such a battle. That is why the Franks are fierce as lions.” The French give a good account of themselves, but at last it becomes clear even to Roland that either they recall Charlemagne to the field or they die. In laisse 128, he turns to Oliver:

Count Roland sees the great slaughter of his men.

He calls his companion Oliver:

“Dear sir, dear comrade, in God’s name, what do you make of this?

You see so many good knights lying on the ground!

Sweet France, the fair, is to be pitied, how impoverished she is now of such knights!

O dear King, what a shame you’re not here!

Dear Oliver, how shall we do it,

How shall we break the news to him?”

Now he asks. Roland announces he will sound the horn—and Oliver reproaches him:

Oliver said: “that would be dishonorable

And a reproach to all your relatives,

The shame of it would last the rest of their lives!

When I told you to, you did nothing at all,

Don’t expect my consent to do it now.

If you sound the horn, it will not be a brave act.

See how bloody both your arms are!”

The Count replies: “I have struck mighty fine blows!”

Oliver’s retort is cruel, and cuts to the erotic/thanatonic quick: “By this beard of mine, if I manage to see my fair sister Alda again, you shall never lie in her arms!”

The central conundrum of Roland is summed up in the next stanza (131), when Roland asks Oliver why he is so angry with him:

The other replies: “Comrade, you brought it on yourself,

For heroism tempered with common sense is a far cry from madness;

Reasonableness is to be preferred to recklessness.

Frenchmen have died because of your senselessness.

We shall never again be of service to Charles.

If you had believed me, my lord would have come,

We would have fought or won (?)12 this battle,

King Marsile would be captured or slain.

We have come to rue your prowess, Roland!

Charlemagne will not have any help from us.

There shall never be such a man again until Judgment Day.

You will die here and France will be dishonored.

Today our loyal companionage comes to an end.

Before nightfall, our parting will be very sad.”

Roland finally blows his magic horn. His temple ruptures from the strain. Oliver and Turpin die fighting. Roland is the last to go; he even tries to smash his indestructible sword rather than have it dishonored by falling into enemy hands. Charlemagne weeps over his dead nephew. It’s a bleak poem, intensified by the latter half of the epic, which goes on to describe Charlemagne’s nightmares, his sanguinary defeat of Baligant, and the gruesome execution of Ganelon. The concluding stanza (291) ends on a note of weariness and near-despair:

When the emperor has dispensed his justice,

And his great wrath has been appeased,

He has Bramimonde christened.

The daylight fades away, night has fallen,

The King has gone to be in his vaulted room.

Saint Gabriel came from God to tell him:

“Charles, summon the armies of your Empire!

You shall invade the land of Bire,

You shall aid King Vivien at Imphe,

The city the pagans have besieged,

The Christians implore and cry out for you.”

The Emperor would rather not go there:

“God!” said the King, “my life is so full of suffering!”

His eyes are brimming with tears, he tugs his white beard.

Here ends the story that Turoldus13 tells.

Well might we weep with the emperor, for in this desolate world there is always another battle to be fought, more blood to be shed, more corpses to be buried. To read Roland today is to witness a sanguinary litany of individual combat: heads are lopped, bodies are cleaved in twain, limbs severed, brains spattered. Neither the poet nor his audiences recoiled from its graphic description of sanctioned violence. When Roland encounters the pagan Valdabron on the field, he strikes him “as hard as he can on his helmet, whose gold is wrought with gems, he slices through head, byrnie, and body, the good saddle, whose gold is wrought with gems, and deeply into the horse’s back, he kills both of them, caring not a whit for blame or for praise.” As the Muslims wail, the triumphant Roland mocks them: “I cannot brook you people, your side is evil and wrong.”

This is about as blunt as the confrontation gets between Roman Catholicism and Islam. However politically incorrect this may strike us today, it is a vivid description of how seriously the West took the threat of Islam at the turn of the millennium: not as a political issue to be resolved by negotiation but as an existential threat that could only end with one side victorious and the other dead on the field or fleeing in fear. It would remain this way through the beginning of the twentieth century when, with the final destruction of the Ottoman Empire and thus the Muslim “caliphate,” the West believed it had finally solved a problem that had bedeviled it for so long. The secular revolution of Kemal Atatürk in 1923, which deinstitutionalized Islam, seemed at last to have decided the conflict between Christianity and Islam in favor of the West. But as 9/11 so vividly demonstrated, this was not the case.

In considering Roland, the question of modern France necessarily arises. The French Revolution, which was even more anticlerical than antimonarchial, seriously damaged the position of the Catholic Church in France; Louis XVI went to the guillotine in 1793 but Napoleon was back on the throne by the end of 1804. The Church never recovered its primacy as France evolved into one of the first European states to become officially secular. Faith, however, is one of the things that made France great: it mobilized the Crusades, built the most magnificent cathedrals in Europe, and gave us some of the greatest sacred music, especially for organ, ever written. Today, however, the French have no spiritual resources within themselves to oppose their country’s burgeoning Muslim population, which not only has no use for Catholicism but for the concept of laïcité itself. Will the French fight for their country, as Roland did? It seems, alas, improbable.

Whether actual combat was anything like that described in Roland is uncertain: the deeds celebrated by the chansons de geste were meant to inspire even as they horrified. In The Poem of the Cid, made into a memorable 1961 movie starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, the Cid fights on past his own death, his corpse strapped to his horse, leading the Spanish and their Moorish allies in the victorious final charge against the North African Almoravids.

Roland, too, lived on—not on the battlefield, but in story and song for hundreds of years after his death, whether actual or poetic. Although the popularity of the Chanson de Roland had waned in France by the thirteenth century, it waxed in Italy, where the popular theater of the day seized upon Roland—now dubbed Orlando—and created, as it were, a backstory for him, detailing his life as a paladino (a solitary knight errant)¹⁴ before the events at Roncevaux. Reflecting the growing taste for courtly romance in popular culture, the main character was transformed from Roland, the warrior knight, into Orlando, the Latin lover. In the late fifteenth century, the Italian poet Matteo Maria Boiardo published the epic poem Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), set in the Carolingian period but blending elements of Arthurian romance as well.

The second coming of Roland/Orlando, however, really arrived with Ludovico Ariosto’s poem, Orlando Furioso (Raging Orlando) completed between 1516 and 1532, which picked up where Boiardo’s unfinished work had left off. Orlando’s titular ire is occasioned by his traduced love for the pagan princess Angelica, who rejects Orlando’s suit to run off with a Saracen instead. Orlando goes mad, laying waste to everything he encounters; he is finally cured when he flies to the moon aboard the prophet Elijah’s chariot, where he finds his wits along with all the other items that had ever been lost on Earth. Cured of his passion for Angelica, he returns to Italy and kills the Saracen king, Agramante, in a battle on the island of Lampedusa.¹⁵

There have been many literary continuations of the Orlando myth, including echoes in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and countless references to it elsewhere. Its best-known stage adaptations have come in the opera house, where Vivaldi, Lully, Rameau, Handel, Piccinni, and Haydn set the material to music, sometimes on more than one occasion. Orlando has also been a favorite source of inspiration for painters, including Delacroix, Ingres, Tiepolo, and Doré.

Like Arminius, however, Roland has faded from memory in the postwar period, and especially in the twenty-first century. The story strikes modern European audiences as jingoistic and possibly “racist,” although there is no mention of race in our contemporary sense anywhere to be found in the source material; the conflict is strictly religious. Still, the idea of a bloodthirsty national hero offends contemporary pacifistic sensibilities; the Christian ardor of Roland is out of place in a France that is becoming palpably less Christian and French, and increasingly Muslim.

At the dramatic heart of the Roland myth is the dichotomy between the hero’s choice to fight rather than to flee. “Death before Dishonor” is not only the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps, it also has been the warrior’s credo for at least two thousand years. The Romans executed deserters; so did the U.S. military up until 1945, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot by firing squad pour encourager les autres after the shock of the German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge had led to a serious desertion problem among U.S. forces in France and Germany.

Roland, however, makes dishonor impossible by refusing to take prudent measures once he knows his command will be overrun; accordingly, he sacrifices his life, those of the Companions, the bishop, and 20,000 men, to the misguided, supererogatory dictates of his conscience. It’s hard for the modern reader not to think him a fool, a distant forebear of Colonel Nicholson in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, who lets his corrupted, impractical sense of duty and honor blind him to the aid he’s giving to his Japanese captors until it’s almost too late—and then (perhaps to his inner gratification) is redeemed only by his own death. Roland not only wipes out his own command and gets his best friend killed, but he also causes his fiancée, Alda, Oliver’s sister, to die of a broken heart upon hearing of his heroic but unnecessary demise. Indeed, it’s Charlemagne who emerges as the real, world-weary, but very modern hero of the Chanson de Roland, not the titular character, nor even the gallant, sensible Oliver.

What has kept the Chanson alive for a thousand years are its stirring battle scenes, among the goriest in Western literature, and the gallant way in which the knights confront their duty and embrace their mortality for a higher cause. The Saracens, too, are portrayed as fearless warriors in the service of a misguided faith; given a choice, the French would rather convert them all to Christianity than kill them, and in fact it is Marsile’s false pledge to abandon the Crescent and embrace the Cross that precipitates the entire story. Post-Napoleon, during the many military reverses the French suffered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nation re-embraced its flawed hero but, in the wake of its complete collapse in little more than a month against Nazi Germany in May and June of 1940, eventually abandoned him for good. In the end, it seems, Islam—imported from the former French colonies in North Africa, might win after all.

Unlike El Cid, there have been no major films about Roland, nor are the plays still in the repertoire; about his only dramatic reincarnation comes in revivals of Handel’s opera seria, Orlando. His shade still wanders on in lesser-known poetry, principally by Victor Hugo in his three volumes of La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), which treats “la mariage de Roland” and fantasizes about a duel between Roland and Oliver as part of a prolonged, ambitious meditation on history and the fate of humanity.¹⁶

The most moving treatment of the Roland legend comes in Alfred de Vigny’s poem, Le Cor (The Horn), published in 1826.

J’aime le son du Cor, le soir, au fond des bois,

Soit qu’il chante les pleurs de la biche aux abois,

Ou l’adieu du chasseur que l’écho faible accueille,

Et que le vent du nord porte de feuille en feuille.

Que de fois, seul, dans l’ombre à minuit demeuré,

J’ai souri de l’entendre, et plus souvent pleuré!

Car je croyais ouïr de ces bruits prophétiques

Qui précédaient la mort des Paladins antiques.

I love the sounding horn, of an eve, deep within the woods,

Whether it sings the plaints of the threatened doe

Or the hunter’s retreat but faintly echoed

That the north wind carries from leaf to leaf.

How often alone, in midnight shadows concealed,

I have smiled to hear it, even shedding a tear!

I thought to hear sounding prophetic plaints,

Declaring the death-knell for knights of old.

—translation by Thomas F. Bertonneau with assistance from Susan D. Bertonneau

Death-knells indeed. Roland, the antihero, goes to his death willingly—it’s inevitable once he refuses to sound the oliphant—but fruitlessly. The Battle of Roncevaux Pass is turned into a particularly bloody public suicide, a failure that, less than two hundred years later, would find its real-life counterpart in the Battle of Hattin in 1187, when the forces of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem were crushed by Saladin. The Crusader chieftain, Raynald de Châtillon, was decapitated, possibly by Saladin himself, and several hundred of the defeated Knights Templar and Hospitaller also went under the sword. A few months later, the city fell, and while the Crusades would continue into the thirteenth century, the principal objective had been lost.

Let us give Vigny the last word:

Ames des Chevaliers, revenez-vous encor?

Est-ce vous qui parlez avec la voix du Cor?

Roncevaux! Roncevaux! Dans ta sombre vallée

L’ombre du grand Roland n’est donc pas consolée!

Souls of the knights, have you returned again?

Is it you who speak with the voice of the horn?

Roncevaux! Roncevaux! In your dark valley

The ghost of great Roland is not consoled!

Even the printing of the legend does not ensure immortality. All Western struggles are open-ended, and remain so to this day. We tend to view the West as not the sum of its art, faith, and culture, but simply its Enlightenment and even Napoleonic politics. But politics is transitory; parties sometimes tactically switch sides. Fundamental definitions change; our notions of “right” and “left” (which are derived from the anti-clerical French Revolution) become increasingly meaningless. In the end, all that is left is culture, which derives from faith, which itself derives from essential human nature. It is how we choose to interpret and immanentize that nature that lies at the heart of all human conflict. The ghost of proud, doomed Roland wanders still.

CHAPTER IV

“WE HAVE COME TO RUE YOUR PROWESS, ROLAND!”