doubt, from mere recklessness,
from hope of plunder or glory; and sometimes they have been scourged
to it. But more often, where one in four or five is likely to
fall, the nobler motive is uppermost with men and felt with burning
earnestness too, which only the breath of the near-at-hand death can
fan up. No! there is reason enough why battle-fields should be, as
they are, places of pilgrimage. The remoteness of the struggle hardly
diminishes the interest with which we visit the scene; Marathon is as
sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year. Nor, on the other
hand, do we need poetic haze from a century or two of intervening
time: Gettysburg was a consecrated spot to all the world before its
dead were buried. There need be no charm of nature; there are tracts
of mere sand in dreary Brandenburg, where old Frederick, with Prussia
in his hand, supple and tough as if plaited into a nation out of
whip-cord, scourged the world; and these tracts are precious. On the
other hand, the grandest natural features seem almost dwarfed and
paltry beside this overmastering interest. On the top of the Grimsel
Pass there is a melancholy, lonely lake which touches the spirit as
much as the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring Finster-Aarhorn,
the Todten See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried
soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags. Had I defined
all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen's spire or the
St. Gotthard. We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with
especial willingness toward battle-fields. There man is most in
earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice
greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions
for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and
solemn. It is right that the sacrifice they have witnessed should
possess an alchemy to make their acres golden.

The humane, and I hope I may be counted among the number, have long
wished that some milder arbitrament than that of arms might intervene
to settle the disagreements of men. No such arbitrament has as yet
come into being. We settle our disputes in this way, and history must
record the struggles, however reluctantly. As an historical writer, it
has been my function to deal with times of conflict in various periods
and lands. When I was seventy years old I began writing a history of
our Civil War. To have at hand the literature of the period I went to
Washingto