ertile pasture, and from the glaciers above
me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was
thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave
and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him;
then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward
in his sheepskin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth
hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving
host pressed after him into every death-yielding terror that man or
nature could throw across his path.

That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not
believe. Nor do I believe it is just for you, high-toned friend, to
censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all
one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great
historic battle-fields. Nothing deserves so to interest man as man
himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected
with man as the spots where he has fought? That we are what we are,
indeed that we are at all,--that any race is what it is or is at
all,--was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as
well as every race can point back. And then nothing absorbs us like a
spectacle of pain and pathos! Tragedy enchants, while it shocks. The
field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to
our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most absorbing? And there is
another side. Once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our
captain told us in low tones that next day we were to go into battle.
He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about
duty. And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the
fire-light to see if the rifles were in order. They would go into
fire because duty said, "Save the country!" and when, soon after, the
steeply-sloping angle of the enemy's works came into view, ominously
red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the
air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one
and that one fell, there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap
close down and pushed ahead in the skirmish-line, was not thinking of
duty. They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say
the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought
of duty has always much to do with the going forward of weaponed men
amongst the weapons. Men do fight, no