people believes in inheritance and hierarchy, and while no
other excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation and
not as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and
takes a lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the
soldier puts up with flogging, It will be remembered that, at the
battle of Inkerman, a sergeant who, as it appears, saved the British
army, could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military
hierarchy does not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be
mentioned in dispatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter
like Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night raid, the
wall of Hougomont, the hollow way of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the
cannon, Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening
him--all this cataclysm is marvelously managed.

Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a
battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which
had the smallest front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon's
three-quarters of a league. Wellington's half a league, and
seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came
the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion
established: loss of men, at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent.;
Russian, thirty per cent.; Austrian, forty-four per cent.: at Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent.; Austrian, fourteen per cent.: at Moscow,
French, thirty-seven per cent.; Russian, forty-four per cent.: at
Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent.; Russian and Prussian, fourteen
per cent.: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent.; allies,
thirty-one per cent.--total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent., or out
of one hundred and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand
killed.

The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness which
belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains; but at night, a sort
of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveler walk about it,
and listen and dream, like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi,
the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful
June 18th lives again, the false monumental hill is leveled, the
wondrous lion is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality,
lines of infantry undulate on the plain; furious galloping crosses the
horizon; the startled dreamer sees the flash of sabers, the sparkle of
bayonets, the red light of shells, the monstrou