FLOWER OF CHIVALRY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 18 July 1924, Page 3

FLOWER OF CHIVALRY.

THE KNIGHTLY BAYARD. FOURTH CENTENAR/Y OF DEATH. It is 400 years since the Chevalier Bayard was killed in battle, and the last great camp of chivalry was extinguished. His name ha s survived as an emblem of gallantry, as he well deserved it should. Controversy has never touched him, for his age knew him for what he was—the paragon of courage and generosity.. Bayard was the reality of Don Quixote’s dream. He was a Quixote not horn too late, and with ’ heart braced by head and hand. A s one the “Right Joyous and Pleasant History,” so happily bequeathed us by his own “loyal servitor,” one thinks of Cervantes only less than one thinks of Malory. His name was Pierre du lerrail, and h© came of th© older or sctrlet” nobility of Dauphine, being horn jit the Chateau Bayart perhaps , ’ 1 1476. He had ancestors killed at Crecy and Poitiers. A handsome and plucky boy, he was started in life as a page to the Duke of Savoy. This was but a step towards the retinue of Charles VIII. of France, in whose services he won a precocious fame in the tilting yard. It was in the great expedition to Italy that his warlike fame arose. At Fornovo he won a standard from the enemy and was knighted. Then he chased a beaten army into Milan until he and they realised that he was the sole pursuer, and he was, of course, taken prisoner. He seems to have so ingenuouslv seen the humour of the thing that Sforza go; “he would have won the whole world by his courtesy.” The “loyal servitor” has some "chapters W u- C i a , re P? rfe(:! tly Arthurian, and which there is no reason to think anything but true —his generous dealing ivith the scurvy Alonso, who after maligned him and. was most justly slain; the Franco-Spanish fight of 13 knights aside, in which Bayard wrested victory out of defeat; the handsome treatment of ap enemy lady and her two daughters. He was the complete amateur of war —sportsman to his finger tips, and indifferent to booty in an age when; it was the accepted crown of success. In rejecting overtures of foreign service, he affirmed his allegiance to “One God in Heaven and one Sovereign upon earth.” Spain and Italy were both theatres of his prowess, and he met the forces of our Henry VIII. in Picardy. He became in a remarkable way the pride of his enemies as well as of his comrades. ,Once he held a bridge by himself against 200 Spaniards; yet “his prudence was not inferior to his valour,” and his tactics wore noted for soundness and success. After the victory of Marignan, in which he had borne a chief part, Francis I. .applied for knighthood at Bayard’s hands. One of his greatest triumphs was the defence of Mezieres and the frustration of the Imperial inroad upon Central Fiance. -The fortress had been declared untenable; Bayard affirmed that “no place was weak which had stout fellows to hold it,” and made the garrison swear to eat their boots if necessary; in the result his 1000 men baffled 35,000 besiegers.

“Sans peur et sans reproche”—the “servitor’s” happy 'epitaph—was •conferred by the whole warlike world on the warrior who lies buried in Grenoble Cathedral. His death came in an effort to retrieve the errors of a superior, Admiral Bonnivet, who had been repulsed and wounded in an expedition into Italy, and who besought the Chevalier to take over the command and extricate the French Army. In guarding the passage of the Lesia lie had his spine shattered by an nrquebusball. There could have been no more perfect' symbolism than this destruction of the .flower of 500 years’ cliivalrv bv ‘villainous saltpetre.” He had always cherished a mortal antipathy to firearms, and those who employed them were among the few denied his mercy—“lt being a great heart-sore to him that a valiant man should he slain bv a paltry ragamuffin.”

“ His end was the most beautiful that I have ever heard of,” wrote one of the enemy commanders in whose midst he expired. 'He had once prayed in illness that he might not “expire like a girl in my bed.” Now, “having never turned my back to the enemy,” he made them set him against a treetrunk, and sent a farewell to his King • ‘Say how much it troubles me that I caai render him no further service.” "4ne lenegade Constable of Bourbon tendered, with the rest, his respectful sympathy. “Grieve not for me,” was the answer, “but for yourself fightiim against your country.” So Bavnrd died and one long chapter of human idealism was dead.