t, and the
men drop into the furnace emitting cries of despair. The horses fare no
better despite their breathless gallop; they feel their flanks and
buttocks devoured by the flames; they become savage. They are seized
with a vertigo; they rear, plunge and fall over upon their riders.
Horses and riders roll down into the brasier at their feet. The horses
neigh piteously, the riders moan or utter curses. An immense concert of
imprecations, of fierce cries of pain and rage rises heavenward with the
flames of the magnificent hecatomb of Frankish warriors!

Oh! Beautiful to the eye is the moor of Kennor, still ruddy and smoking
an hour after it is set on fire and consumed to the very root of its
heather! Splendid brasier three leagues wide, strewn with thousands of
Frankish bodies, shapeless, charred. Warm quarry above which already
flocks of carrion-crows from the forest of Cardik are hovering! Glory to
you, Bretons! More than a third of the Frankish army met death on the
moor of Kennor.

"What a war! What a war!" also exclaims Louis the Pious.

Aye, a merciless war; a holy war; a thrice holy war, waged by a people
in defence of their freedom, their homes, their fields, their hearths;
Oh, ancient land of the Gauls! Oh, old Armorica, sacred mother!
Everything turns into a weapon in the hands of your rugged children
against their barbarous invaders! Rocks, precipices, marshes, woods,
moors on fire! Oh, Brittany, betrayed by those of your own children who
succumbed to the wiles of the Catholic priests, stabbed at your heart by
the sword of the Frankish kings, and pouring out the generous heart
blood of your children, perchance, after all, you will feel the yoke of
the conquerer on your neck! But the bones of your enemies, crushed,
burned and drowned in the struggle, will tell to our descendants the
tale of a resistance that Armorica offered to her casqued and mitred
invaders!

CHAPTER VIII.

THE VALLEY OF LOKFERN.

Decimated by the conflagration of the moor of Kennor, the Frankish army
flees in disorder in the direction of the valley of Lokfern, that lies
slightly below the vast plateau on which an hour before the three
Frankish divisions have joined, confident that their trials are ended.
Escaped from the disaster of the conflagration and carried onward by the
impetuosity of their steeds, a portion of the Frankish cavalry that
follows Louis the Pious in his precipitate flight, arrives at the
confines of the p