And though
the French count it one among the thousand of their battles, I doubt
whether even in Paris most men would recognize it for the hammer-blow it
was. The men of the time hardly knew it, though Carnot guessed at it, and
now to-day in Sorbonne I think that regal fight is taking its true place.
So I went down the eight miles of front northward along the ridge; for
even that battle, a hundred and more years ago, had an extended front of
this kind. I recognized the tall majestic fringe of beeches from which
had issued the last of the Royalist regiments bearing for the last time
upon a European field the white flag of the Bourbon Monarchy; I came
beyond it to the combe fringed with its semicircle of underbrush in
which Coburg had massed his guns in the last effort to break the French
centre when his flank was turned. I came to the main highway, very
broad, straight, and paved, which cuts this battlefield in two, and then
beyond it to the central position whose capture had made the final
manoeuvre possible.
All Wednesday the Grenadiers, German, tall, padded, smart, and stout,
had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that they
were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls, shoeless,
some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain and glory.
And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this battle, like so
many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men against boys; how grey
and veteran and trained in arms were the Austrians and the Prussians,
their allies, how strict in orders, how calm: and what children the
Terror had called up by force from the exhausted fields of remote French
provinces, to break them here against the frontier, like water against a
wall.
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