more than a battle. Their honor, dignity, enlightenment, and genius
are not numbers which those gamblers, heroes, and conquerors can stake
in the lottery of battles. Very often a battle lost is progress
gained, and less of glory, more of liberty. The drummer is silent and
reason speaks; it is the game of who loses wins. Let us, then, speak
of Waterloo coldly from both sides, and render to chance the things
that belong to chance, and to God what is God's. What is Waterloo--a
victory? No; a quine in the lottery, won by Europe, and paid by
France; it was hardly worth while erecting a lion for it.

Waterloo, by the way, is the strangest encounter recorded in history;
Napoleon and Wellington are not enemies, but contraries. Never did
God, who delights in antitheses, produce a more striking contrast, or
a more extraordinary confrontation. On one side precision, foresight,
geometry, prudence, a retreat assured, reserves prepared, an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy profiting by the ground,
tactics balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war
regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old
classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have
intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a
flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like
lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with
destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned, and,
to some extent, compelled to obey, the despot going so far as even to
tyrannize over the battle-field; faith in a star, blended with
strategic science, heightening, but troubling it. Wellington was the
Bareme of war, Napoleon was its Michelangelo, and this true genius was
conquered by calculation. On both sides somebody was expected; and it
was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon waited for Grouchy,
who did not come; Wellington waited for Blucher, and he came.

Wellington is the classical war taking its revenge; Bonaparte, in his
dawn, had met it in Italy, and superbly defeated it--the old owl fled
before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only
overthrown, but scandalized. Who was this Corsican of six-and-twenty
years of age? What meant this splendid ignoramus, who, having
everything against him, nothing for him, without provisions,
ammunition, guns, shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men
against masses, dashed at