growing, and the cruelty of Eormenric, who used tortures to his
prisoners, of Rothe, who stripped his captives, and of Fro, who sent
captive ladies to a brothel in insult, is regarded with dislike.

Wounds were looked on as honourable, but they must be in front or
honourably got. A man who was shot through the buttocks, or wounded in
the back, was laughed at and disgraced. We hear of a mother helping her
wounded son out of battle.

That much of human interest centered round war is evident by the mass
of tradition that surrounds the subject in Saxo, both in its public and
private aspects. Quaint is the analysis of the four kinds of warriors:
(a) The Veterans, or Doughty, who kill foes and spare flyers; (b) the
Young men who kill foes and flyers too; (c) the well-to-do, landed, and
propertied men of the main levy, who neither fight for fear nor fly for
shame; (d) the worthless, last to fight and first to fly; and curious
are the remarks about married and unmarried troops, a matter which Chaka
pondered over in later days. Homeric speeches precede the fight.

"Stratagems of War" greatly interested Saxo (probably because Valerius
Maximus, one of his most esteemed models, was much occupied with such
matters), so that he diligently records the military traditions of the
notably skillful expedients of famous commanders of old.

There is the device for taking a town by means of the "pretended death"
of the besieging general, a device ascribed to Hastings and many more
commanders (see Steenstrup Normannerne); the plan of "firing" a besieged
town by fire-bearing birds, ascribed here to Fridlev, in the case of
Dublin to Hadding against Duna (where it was foiled by all tame birds
being chased out of the place).