[200] forty thousand. Tremendous odds! But these men are fighting for God, and they know no fear. ‘In God is our help,’ was the battery which went up from that devoted band.
The army of the invaders divides; one part remains encamped at Emmaus under Nicanor; the other part, under Gorgias, makes a detour through the mountains to surprise Judas and destroy him in his tents. This is his opportunity, and with the instinct of genius he seizes it. With the celerity of movement for which he was famous, and in which he is unequalled in ancient or in modern times, except, as I think, by the ‘foot-cavalry’ of Stonewall Jackson, he descended upon the camp of Nicanor, and when Gorgias had reached the mountain top, where he expected to find his victim, he could behold the conflagration which proclaimed the rout and destruction of the main body of the invading army.
Nor is he left long to brood over his disappointment. Before nightfall of that eventful day, and before he could extricate himself from that mountainous region, he is attacked in one of its defiles with such impetuous fury that his army melts in a moment, and flees in terror, with the avenging swords of the patriots driving them like the scourge of God. The discomfited generals return to the regent Lysias, and declare that ‘the God who fought for the Jews is indeed mighty, and it is worse than useless to attack them.’
Now it seems strange to me that this great general, who fought a score of battles, and always at the odds of about one man against ten, but yet who never lost an engagement, who achieved the independence of his country, and who wrested freedom from the mighty power of the Grecian Empire, has not been accorded the place in the estimation of the world to which his signal prowess and military genius entitle him. I know no reason except that which was alleged by Tacitus in a similar instance, when he says of the Greeks, that they ‘never admire any exploits but their own.’ Grecian literature is silent respecting Judas Maccabeus, and Grecian literature has moulded the thought of the world.
Surely it is not enough to do deeds of glory. Their formative influence, their inspiring example, is lost to the world unless they are embodied in an imperishable literature. And I assert that no more imperative duty lies before the South than to secure the preservation of the records of our recent war. I do not mean so much the records of extended campaigns, which I have no doubt the military historian will faithfully chronicle, but the personal acts of devotion and deeds of prowess, which shed the light of a higher glory on the dark page
