right wing had followed in the last attack I saw neither man nor beast,
but only the same stubble of the same autumn fields, and the same colder
sun shining upon the empty uplands until I reached the crest where the
Hungarian and the Croat had met the charge, and had disputed the little
village for two hours--a dispute upon which hung your fate and mine and
that of Europe.

It was a tiny little village, seven or eight houses together and no
more, with a crazy little wooden steeple to its church all twisted awry,
large barns, and comfortable hedgerows of the Northern kind; and from it
one looked out westwards over an infinity of country, following low
crest after low crest, down on to the French plains. I went into the inn
of the place to drink, and found the cobbler there complaining that
wealth disturbed the natural equality of men. Then I wandered out,
pacing this point and that which I knew accurately from my maps, and
thinking of the noise of the war. Behind the little church, upon a
ramshackle green not large enough to pitch the stumps for single-wicket,
was the modest monument, a cock in bronze, crowing, and the word
"Victory" stamped into the granite of the pedestal; the whole thing, I
suppose, not ten feet high. The bronze was very well done; it savoured
strongly of Paris and looked odd in this abandoned little place. But
every time my eyes sank from the bronze, to look at some other point in
the landscape to identify the emplacement of such and such a battery or
the gully that had concealed the advance of such and such a troop, my
glance perpetually returned to that word "VICTORY," sculptured by itself
upon the stone. It was indeed a victory; it was a victory which, for its
huge unexpectedness, for the noise of it, for the length of time during
which it was in doubt, for its final success, there is no parallel, and
yet it is by no means among the famous battles of the world. And though
the French count it one among the thousand of their battles, I doubt