hand consists so largely of commonplaces and trivial details
that I hope I may be pardoned for recording the anxieties and cares of
this lady from Brooklyn. Her point of view so admirably illustrates one
side of war. It is only when you are ten years away from it, or ten
thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull places, and only
the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque, and momentous. We
have read, in "Vanity Fair," of the terror and the mad haste to escape of
the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. That is the obvious and
dramatic side.

That is the picture of war you remember and which appeals. As a rule,
people like to read of the rumble of cannon through the streets of
Ventersburg, the silent, dusty columns of the re-enforcements passing in
the moonlight, the galloping hoofs of the aides suddenly beating upon the
night air and growing fainter and dying away, the bugle-calls from the
camps along the river, the stamp of spurred boots as the general himself
enters the hotel and spreads the blue-print maps upon the table, the
clanking sabres of his staff, standing behind him in the candle-light,
whispering and tugging at their gauntlets while the great man plans his
attack. You must stop with the British army if you want bugle-calls and
clanking sabres and gauntlets. They are a part of the panoply of war and
of warriors. But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg that night, only a
few cattle-breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had
won from the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of
gentleman adventurers--gathered around a table discussing other days in
other lands. The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the
people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming in
the distance, or as one sees it in "Shenandoah," where aides gallop on
and off the stage and the night signals flash from both sides of the
valley. That is the obvious and dramatic side; the other side of war is
the night before the battle, at Jones's Hotel; the landlady in the
dining-room with her elbows on the table, fretfully deciding that after a
day in front of the cooking-stove she is too tired to escape an invading
army, declaring that the one place at which she would rather be at that
moment was Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, the heated argument that
immediately follows between the foreign legion and the Americans as to
whether Rector's is not