takes possession of him. The terrible June 18 relives; the
artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, the lion
disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines
of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by
furious charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the
gleam of sabres, the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of
bursting shells, the clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the
muffled clamor of the phantom conflict comes to him like
dying moans from the tomb; these shadows are grenadiers,
these lights are cuirassiers . . . all this does not really
exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are stained with
purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the clouds,
and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-Jean,
Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-pear
dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one
another.

The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanished
hosts is not novel. In such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark
hand on the imagination, and prompts one to invoke the unappeased spirit
of the past that haunts the place. One summer evening long ago, as I was
standing alone by the ruined walls of Hougomont, with that sense of not
being alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by solitude, I had
a sudden vision of that desperate last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard.
Marshal Ney rose from the grave and again shouted those heroic words
to Drouet d'Erlon: "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" For an
instant a thousand sabres flashed in the air. The deathly silence that
accompanied the ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the short-lived
dream. A moment later I beheld a hunched little figure mounted on a
white horse with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay slack in the