It was
the new that conquered.
From that evening I was determined to visit this place of which so far I
had but read, and to see how far it might agree with the vision I had
had of it, and to people actual fields with the ghosts of dead soldiers.
And for the better appreciation of the drama I chose the season and the
days on which the fight had been driven across that rolling land, and I
came there, as the Republicans had come, a little before the dawn.
The hillside was silent and deserted, more even than are commonly such
places, though silence and desertion seem the common atmosphere of all
the fields on which such fates have been decided. A man looking over
Carthage Bay, especially a man looking at those sodden pools that were
the sound harbours of Carthage, might be in an uninhabited world; and
the loop of the Trebbia is the same, and the edge of Fontenoy; and even
here in England that hillside looking south up which the Normans charged
at Battle is a quiet and a drowsy sort of place.... So it was here in
Flanders.
For two miles as I ascended by the little sunken lane which the extreme
right wing had followed in the last attack I saw neither man nor beast,
but only the same stubble of the same autumn fields, and the same colder
sun shining upon the empty uplands until I reached the crest where the
Hungarian and the Croat had met the charge, and had disputed the little
village for two hours--a dispute upon which hung your fate and mine and
that of Europe.
Pages:
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104