diers employed in
working on trenches and fortifications or in undermining those
of an enemy; here, engaged in surveying.

[47] #Ordnance Map#: an official or government map.

[48] #Balak#: see Numbers xxii.

BATTLE OF ASHDOWN.

And now we leave the camp, and descend toward the west, and are on
the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for
Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their
bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred[49]
won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown "AEscendum" in the
chroniclers), which broke the Danish power, and made England a
Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are
standing--the whole crown of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had
beforehand seized the higher ground," as old Asser[50] says, having
wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to
burst down on the fair vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage.
And up the heights came the Saxons,[51] as they did at the Alma.[52]
"The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood
also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which
we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old
chronicler![53] does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree"
but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge
of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an old single
thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least, if it isn't the same tree,
it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the battle
must have been won or lost--"around which, as I was saying, the two
lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in this
place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell
down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same
place." After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might
never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country-side, carved out
on the northern side of the chalk hill under the camp, where it is
almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may
see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale over which
it has looked these thousand years and more.

[49] #Alfred#: Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons, 871.
He defeated the Danes, who had overrun most of England, at
Ashdown, and compelled them to make a treaty of peace. He is
jus