uding,
as it were, with an Amen.

And now, having seen a great military march through a friendly country;
the pomps and festivities of more than one German court; the severe
struggle of a hotly contested battle, and the triumph of victory, Mr.
Esmond beheld another part of military duty: our troops entering the
enemy's territory, and putting all around them to fire and sword;
burning farms, wasted fields, shrieking women, slaughtered sons and
fathers, and drunken soldiery, cursing and carousing in the midst of
tears, terror, and murder. Why does the stately Muse of History, that
delights in describing the valor of heroes and the grandeur of conquest,
leave out these scenes, so brutal, mean, and degrading, that yet form by
far the greater part of the drama of war? You, gentlemen of England, who
live at home at ease, and compliment yourselves in the songs of triumph
with which our chieftains are bepraised--you pretty maidens, that come
tumbling down the stairs when the fife and drum call you, and huzzah for
the British Grenadiers--do you take account that these items go to make
up the amount of the triumph you admire, and form part of the duties of
the heroes you fondle? Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving
only the Frenchmen, worshipped almost, had this of the godlike in him,
that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat.
Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a
hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the
door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or
a monarch's court or a cottage table, where his plans were laid, or an
enemy's battery, vomiting flame and death, and strewing corpses round
about him;--he was always cold, calm, resolute, like fate. He performed
a treason or a court-bow, he told a falsehood as black as Styx, as
easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a
mistress, and left her; he betrayed his benefactor, and supported him,
or would have murdered him, with the same calmness always, and having
no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis when
she cuts it. In the hour of battle I have heard the Prince of Savoy's
officers say, the Prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury;
his eyes lighted up; he rushed hither and thither, raging; he shrieked
curses and encouragement, yelling and harking his bloody war-dogs on,
and himself always at the first