The Roman armies were constantly baffled by this method of escape in conquering the Armenians and Arabs in Asia Minor, or Gauls of France and the Teutonic tribes of South Germany. When the Saracens invaded France from Spain in the 8th century, they found that the inhabitants, profiting by experience, had constructed underground retreats inaccessible to them, and by this means, almost alone, was the country saved from utter depopulation. Scarcely a century passed for several hundred years that this dreadful experience was not repeated at the hands of the Northmen (9th century); at the hands of English conquerors (12th century); at the hands of the Pope of Rome in the persecution of the Albigenses (14th century) and at the hands of local robber barons all the time.
It did not take long for the defenseless peasantry and townsmen to learn that their natural caves were not capacious enough to house the people, and they began to construct great subterranean halls, usually beneath their farms and villages, but often high in the faces of cliffs and ways so difficult of access that one man could defend the ladder or narrow stairs by which they were reached. Hundreds of such underground, labyrinthine, caves of refuge, are known in southern and central France, and have been surveyed and described by French antiquaries, each large enough to contain the people of the neighborhood, with much property and provisions for a siege. Lacoste, in his (History of Quercy,' remarks that in Lower Quercy the inhabitants dug souterrains with a labor that only love of life could prompt. ((Three of vast extent have been discovered at Fontanes, Mondoumerc, and Olmie . .. The vastest and most remarkable for its extent and the labor devoted to it is at Olmie. The chambers are scooped out of a very hard sand stone. In some of them are little wells or reservoirs that were filled with water as a pre caution against thirst.* The entrance to such a hiding place was carefully concealed in a cellar, or under a movable stone in a church floor, or in a thicket; and all the excavated ma terial was widely scattered so as not to betray the place.
It was the duty of every feudal seigneur to protect his vassals in return for their fealty and service; and every old castle in southern Europe built in feudal times, almost always in some high and preferably isolated situation, stands on rock drilled through and through with galleries and chambers. ((On the alarm being given ,a in the words of Baring-Gould, aof the approach of an army marching through the land ... or the hovering of a band of brigands
over the spot, within a few hours all this under ground world was filled with plows, looms, bedding, garments, household stuff of every description, and rang with the bleating of sheep, the lowing of oxen, the neighing of horses, arid the whimpering of women and children.* This writer gives a list of 49 places in the depart ment of Vienne alone, where such grottoes have been discovered, mostly under churches and castles, and we believe his statement that they number thousands in France alone. Where the entrance was not within the walls of a castle, defenses were arranged against assault. The entrance was very narrow, steeply inclined, pro vided with concealed pitfalls, and defended by interior doors and by side-galleries from which entering assailants might be speared or otherwise attacked. Nevertheless horrible tales remain in history of large numbers of per sons being burnt out, or suffocated by smoke in these caves, or walled up by their enemies and left to starve.
Such souterrains abound in the northwest of France, also, where the most dreadful wars and oppression have swept the land again and again. Not only under villages, but beneath the scattered woodlands, the chalk was (and is) riddled with chambers and passages like an ant's nest. Victor Hugo has given, in his (Quatre-vingt Treize,' a vivid picture of this state of things in Brittany at the time of the dreadful peasant uprising called La Vendee (1793-96). *The gloomy Breton forests,* he tells us, were servants and accomplices in the rebellion.* The subsoil of every forest was a sort of sponge pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells and galleries. The underground belligerents lurking in these hovels under trap-doors were kept perfectly informed of what was going on, and would spring up under the feet, or just behind the heels of their ambushed foes. Hugo asserts that in Isle-et-Villaine, in the forest of Pertre, not a human trace was to be found, yet there were collected 6,000 men under Focard. In the forest of Meullac, in Morhiban, not a soul was to be seen, yet it held 8,000 men? No wonder Napoleon's recruiting-sergeants could find few young men to impress, in the latter years of his campaigns — they had all run to their holes like scared rabbits.