And for
the rest, just the brown earth and the sky. There are days on which you
will see a man at work somewhere within that mile, others on which it is
completely deserted. Here it is that the French Revolution was
preserved. Here was the Prussian charge. On the deserted, ugly lump of
empty earth beyond you were the three batteries that checked the
invaders. It was all alive and crowded for one intense moment with the
fate of Christendom. Here, on the place in which you are standing and
gazing, young Goethe stood and gazed. That meaningless stretch of coarse
grass supported Brunswick and the King of Prussia, and the brothers of
the King of France, as they stood windswept in the rain, watching the
failure of the charge. It is the field of Valmy. Turn on that height and
look back westward and you see the plains rolling out infinitely; they
are the plains upon which Attila was crushed; but there is no one there.
All men have remarked that night and silence are august, and I think
that if this quality in night and silence be closely examined it will be
found to consist, in part at least, in this: that either of them
symbolizes Absence. By a paradox which I will not attempt to explain,
but which all have felt, it is in silence and in darkness that the Past
most vividly returns, and that this absence of what once was possesses,
nay, obtrudes itself upon the mind: it becomes almost a sensible thing.
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