whoever has had occasion, whether for study or for curiosity, to visit many of the battlefields of europe, must have been especially struck by their silence. there are many things combining to produce this impression, but when all have been accounted for, something over remains. thus it is true that in any countryside the contrast between the noise of the great fight that fills one’s mind and the natural calm of woods and of fields must penetrate the mind; and, again, it is evident that any piece of land which one closely examines, noting all its details for the purposes of history, must seem more lonely and deserted than those general views in which the eye comprehends so much of the work of man; because all this special watching of particular corners, noting of ranges and the rest, make one’s progress slow, keep one’s eyes close fixed to things more or less near, and thus allow one to appreciate how far between men are save in the towns. but there is more than this. it can be proved that there is more. for the same sense of complete loneliness does not take a man in other similar work. he does not feel it when he is surveying for a map nor when he is searching for an historic site other than that of battle. but the battlefields are lonely.
[277]some few, especially in this crowded island, are not lonely. life has overtaken them, spreading outwards from the towns. by what a curious irony, for instance, the racecourse at lewes, with a shouting throng of men as the horses go by, corresponds precisely to the place where must have been the thickest of the advance on montfort’s right as he led them to attack the king. evesham is not lonely. battle is full of houses and of villas, and the chief centre of the fight is in a garden.
but for the most part the great battlefields are lonely; and their loneliness is unnatural and oppressive. in some way they repel men. trasimene is the lonely shore of a marsh. one would imagine that a place so famous would be in some way visited. one of the great sewers of cosmopolitan travel runs close by; one would imagine that the historic interest of the place would bring men from that railway to the shore upon which so very nearly the orientals destroyed us. there is no such publicity. sitting at evening near those reeds, where the great fight was fought, one has a feeling, rare in italy, commoner in the north, of complete isolation. there is nothing but water and the evening sky, and it is so mournful that one might imagine it a place to which things doomed would come to die.
roncesvalles, which means so little in the military history of europe and so much in her literature, is a profound gorge, cleft right into the earth 3000[278] feet, and clothed with such mighty beech woods that for these alone, apart from its history, one might imagine it to be perpetually visited. it is not visited. no house is near it, save the huddled huts round the gloomy place of pilgrimage upon the farther side of the pass. a silence more profound, a sense of recession more complete, is not to be discovered upon any of the great roads of europe—for one of the great roads goes by the place where roland died, but very few travel along it.
toulouse is popular and noisy; surrounded by so many small market gardens and so busy and humming a southern life (detestable to quiet men!) that you might think no site near it was touched with loneliness. but there is such a site. it is the crest beyond the city where wellington’s victory was won. more curious still, waterloo, at the very gates of brussels, within a stone’s throw, one may say, of building sites for suburbs, is the only lonely place in its neighbourhood. that valley, or rather that little dip which is so great in military history and yet which did so little to change the general movement of the world, is the one deserted set of fields that you can find for a long way round. and the soil of belgium, a gridiron of railways, stuffed with industry, a place where one short walk takes you from a town to a town anywhere throughout the little state, is still remarkable for the way in which its battlefields seem to fend off the[279] presence of man. the plateau of fleurus, the marshy banks of jemappes, the roll of neerwinden, all illustrate what i mean.
if one considers in what two places since christendom was christendom most was done to save christendom from destruction, one will fix upon the catalaunian fields and upon that low tableland in the fork of the two rivers between poitiers and tours. in the first attila was broken, asia from the east; in the second the mohammedan, asia from the south. the catalaunian fields have a bleakness amazing to the traveller. nothing perhaps so near so much wealth is so utterly alone. great folds of empty land that will grow little, that only lately were planted with stunted pine trees that they might at least grow something, weary the eye. one dead straight road, roman in origin, gallic in its continuance, drives right across the waste. it is there that the huns were broken. it is from that point that their sullen retreat eastward was permitted, as was permitted in 1792 the retreat eastward of the royal armies from their check in that same plain at valmy; and valmy also is intensely lonely, a bare ridge despoiled to-day even of its mill, and the little chapel raised to the soul of kellerman hides itself away so that you do not see it until you are close upon the place.
poitiers has the same loneliness. the mohammedan had ridden up from the pyrenees, ricochetted[280] from the walls of toulouse, but poured on like a flood into the centre of gaul. charles the hammer broke him in the fields beyond vouneuil. the district is populous and the valley of the clain is full of pastures and among the tenderest of european valleys, but as you drift down stream and approach this place the plateau upon the right above you grows bare, and it was there, so far as modern scholarship can be certain, that the last effort of the arabs was forced back.
that other battle of poitiers among the vineyards, the black prince’s battle, one would imagine, could not seem lonely, for it was fought in the midst of tilled land full of vineyards and right above the great high road which leads south-east from the town. but lonely it is, and if you will go up the little gully where the head of the french column advanced against the english archers upon the high land above, you will not find a man to tell you the memories of the place.
cre?y was fought close to a county town; but the same trick of landscape or of influence is also played there. the town hides itself in a little hollow upon the farther flank of a hill, and though the right of edward’s line reposed upon it, and though it was within a bowshot of the houses that the boy his son was pressed so hard, yet cre?y hides away from the battlefield. and as you come in by the eastern road, which takes you all along the crest of the english position, there is nothing before you but a naked and[281] a silent land, falling in a dip to where the first of the french charge failed, and rising in long empty lengths of fallow and of grass to where you can see, a single mark for the eye in so much loneliness, the rude cross standing on the place where the blind king of bohemia fell.
loneliest of all, with a loneliness which perpetually haunts me whenever i write of it, is that battlefield which i know best and have most closely studied. it is the battlefield on which, as i believe, more was done to affect both military and general history than on any other—the battlefield of wattignies. here the revolution certainly stood, to go under with the fall of maubeuge, which was at the last gasp for food, or, with the raising of that siege, to go forward. by the success at wattignies the siege was raised. in military history also it is of great account, for at wattignies for the first time the great mind of carnot, the darting, aquiline mind of that man whose school of tactics produced napoleon, first dealt with an army. at wattignies for the first time the concentration at the fullest expense of fatigue, of overwhelming force upon one point of the objective, came into play and was successful. such tactics needed the infantry which as a fact were used in their development. still, they were new. now, wattignies, where so much was done to change the art of war and to transform europe, is as lonely as anything on earth. lines of high trees, a wood almost uncultivated (a rare thing in france), a swept,[282] wintry upland without a house or a barn, a little huddled group of poor steadings round a tiny church, and against it all the while rain and hard weather driving from the french plains below: that is wattignies. up through those sunken ways by which duquesnoy’s division charged you will not meet a single human being, and that heath over which the emigrant nobles countercharged for the last time under the white flag is similarly bereft of men. nowhere do you more feel the unnatural loneliness of those haunted places of honour than in this which i believe to be the chief one of all the european fields.
