most famous; it is not Waterloo, nor Leipsic, nor Austerlitz, nor even
Jemappes. The more I read into the night the more I perceived that upon
the issue of that struggle depended the fate of the modern world. So
completely did the notes of Carnot and a few private letters that had
been put before me absorb my attention that I will swear the bugle-calls
of those two days (for it was a two-days' struggle) sounded more clearly
in my ears than the rumble of the London streets, and, as this died out
with the advance of the night and the approach of morning, I was living
entirely upon that ridge in Flanders, watching, as a man watches an
arena, whether the new things or the old should be victorious. 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