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Maid-At-Arms, The
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Maid-At-Arms, by Robert W. Chambers This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Maid-At-Arms
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Release Date: May 6, 2004 [EBook #12279]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE
MAID-AT-ARMS
A Novel
By
Robert W. Chambers
Illustrated by
Howard Chandler Christy
1902
TO
MISS KATHARINE HUSTED
PREFACE
After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective complacency.
Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.
Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.
For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--for in this land we have no haze to soften truth.
Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to victory--but