mangled
shapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon the
blood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping by
like vague wailings of the wind--all this might be taken for an artful
appropriation of Victor Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though
it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant page, read in
early youth, still lingered on the retina of M. Rostand's memory. If
such were the case, it does not necessarily detract from the integrity
of the conception or the playwright's presentment of it.

(1) The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which
belongs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like
all other plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary
mist is exhaled, and if any traveler walks there, and
watches and listens, and dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful
plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe
takes possession of him. The terrible June 18 relives; the
artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, the lion
disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines
of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by
furious charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the
gleam of sabres, the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of
bursting shells, the clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the
muffled clamor of the phantom conflict comes to him like
dying moans from the tomb; these shadows are grenadiers,
these lights are cuirassiers . . . all this does not really
exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are stained with
purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the clouds,
and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-Jean,
Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-pear
dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one
another.

The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanished
hosts is not novel. In such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark
hand on the imagination, and prompts one to invoke the unappeased spirit
of the past that haunts the place. One summer evening long ago, as I was
standing alone by the ruined walls of Hougomont, with that sense of not
being alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by solitude, I had
a sudden vision of that desperate last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard.
Marshal Ney rose from the grave and again shouted those her