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Updated: May 9, 2025
Certainly Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton exhibited no lack of firmness on the shambles of battlefields; and there are few men living who cannot recall instances of women who have, in the face of disaster and evil fortune, shown a steady perseverance and will-power in earning a living for themselves and their children that men have not surpassed.
We all remember how Macaulay made a long winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie before he sat down to write upon it; and Carlyle's magnificent battle-pieces are not all imagination; even that wonderful writer had to see Frederick's battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust himself to describe them.
Even in the artillery the importance of independent action will be more clearly emphasized than previously. The battlefields and area of operations have increased with the masses employed. The Commander-in-Chief is far less able than ever before to superintend operations in various parts of the field; he is forced to allow a greater latitude to his subordinates.
My thoughts, and I cannot help them, are attracted by the horizontal body that the world bruises; they go into the ground with it and mold a shape for it. Its face what is the look which rots crushed in the dark depth of the earth at the top of these remains? Ah, one catches sight of what there is under the battlefields!
I would have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we get thence. As the historian has striven to obscure the real nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats.
One may imagine what a man accomplishes who still has a good hand and arm. It was both interesting and pathetic to see these men guiding their work with their remaining hand and manipulating the machinery with the stump of the other arm. Those who come out from the battlefields with health intact will be no charge to the state, no matter what their mutilations.
And when one thinks of the militarism that is crushing Europe and driving her ignorant classes to wild schemes of revolution; and when one thinks of the hell of battlefields, of the miseries of the wounded, of mourning widows, of ruined peaceful peasants, of the devil's passions that war sets loose, some of us find it extremely hard to believe that all that is ever in accordance with the mind of Christ.
It is doggerel, of course, but it has a certain cleverness as a satire on the music-hall song of the day, and the Gordons carried it gaily with them to their battlefields, blending it in that odd mixture of humor and tragedy that makes up the soldier's life.
But by degrees, as the stress of these unsought imaginings abated, his thoughts turned to Francis himself again, who, through all his boyhood and early manhood, had been to him a sort of ideal and inspiration. How he had loved and admired him, yet never with a touch of jealousy! And Francis, whose letter lay open by him on the table, lay dead on the battlefields of France.
At noon the same party was sitting in the hall, having finished their dinners, as I passed through to mine. They greeted me cordially and said, "We heard of what you said about overhearing us last night; take a seat and let's discuss old times." My answer was, "I have met you gentlemen already on too many battlefields with an empty stomach, so wait till I get my dinner."
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