title: The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
author:  Robert Steven Gottfried 
description: A fascinating work of detective history, <I>The Black Death</I> traces the causes and far-reaching consequences of this infamous outbreak of plague that spread across the continent of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Drawing on sources as diverse as monastic manuscripts and dendrochronological studies (which measure growth rings in trees), historian Robert S. Gottfried demonstrates how a bacillus transmitted by rat fleas brought on an ecological reign of terror -- killing one European in three, wiping out entire villages and towns, and rocking the foundation of medieval society and civilization.
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  The Lost Guidon  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  # The Lost Guidon
  
  
  ### Charles Egbert Craddock
  
  
  This page formatted 2007 Blackmask Online.
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  Produced by David Widger
  
  
  
  
  
  THE LOST GUIDON
  
  By Charles Egbert Craddock
  
  1911
  
  Night came early. It might well seem that day had fled affrighted. The heavy
  masses of clouds, glooming low, which had gathered thicker and thicker, as if
  crowding to witness the catastrophe, had finally shaken asunder in the
  concussions of the air at the discharges of artillery, and now the direful
  rain, always sequence of the shock of battle, was steadily falling, falling,
  on the stricken field. Many a soldier who might have survived his wounds would
  succumb to exposure to the elements during the night, debarred the tardy
  succor that must needs await his turn. One of the surgeons at their hasty work
  at the field hospital, under the shelter of the cliffs on the slope, paused to
  note the presage of doom and death, and to