..!
There was a little chap, twelve years old, a drummer; he had crept and
crawled by hedgerows till he found himself behind the line of those
volleying Grenadiers. There, "before his side," and breaking all rules,
he had sounded the roll of the charge. They cut him down and killed him,
and the roll of his drum ceased hard. A generation or more later,
digging for foundations at this spot, the builders of the Peace came
upon his bones, the little bones of a child heaped pell-mell with
skeletons of the fallen giants round him.
I went back into the town in whose defence the battle had been waged,
and there I saw again in bronze this little lad, head high and mouth
open, a-beating of his drum, and again the word "VICTORY."
All that effort was undertaken, all those young men and children killed,
for something that was to happen for the salvation of the world; it has
not come. All that iron resistance of the German line had been forged
and organized till it almost conquered, till it almost thwarted, the
Republic, and it also had been organized for the defence, and, as some
thought, for the salvation, of the world. Some great good was to have
come by the storming of that hill, or some great good by the defeat of
the impetuous charge. Well, the hill was stormed, and (if you will) at
Leipsic the effort which had stormed it was rolled back. What has
happened to the High Goddess whom that youth followed, and worshipped as
they say, and what to the Gods whom their enemies defended? The ridge is
exactly the same.
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