Pillager

A plunderer. Soldiers who take advantage of the chaos of war to steal whatever they can lay their hands on.

“Protracted warfare had changed men into wild beasts; now it was necessary to change these brutalized creatures into men again, into Christians, into obedient subjects. A great transformation, and difficult! Some of those Armagnac captains were perhaps the most ferocious men that ever lived. One name is enough, a horrendous name: that of Gilles de Retz, the prototype of Bluebeard. Yet there was still one way of acting upon those dark souls; they had sunk below humanity, below nature, but they had not completely discarded religion. The brigands, it is true, managed to reconcile in the most bizarre fashion their religion and their brigandage. One of them, the Gascon La Hire, made this startling remark, ‘If God became man, He would be a pillager.’ And when he went after loot, he offered his little Gascon prayer, without saying too explicitly what he wanted, trusting that God would take the hint: ‘Sire God, I pray Thee to do for La Hire what La Hire would do for Thee, if Thou wert a captain, and La Hire were God.’”

Jules Michelet, Joan of Arc (1841).

[Translated by Albert Guèrard.]