Reflections.
“Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us.
But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities—spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette, in the tumbrel, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow—these things have been, but now they are not; yet they endure.
[Chapter XIII.]
BLENHEIM
Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet—somehow these names lie contiguous in the mind; so stored away, perhaps, in the brain cells long ago, and thus forever associative.
Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff—while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone—while he plays with his great grandchild? the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe—while narcotic night silences the streets of Baltimore?
“Potentially down in subconsciousness,” says my glib psychologist. Eloquent answer! But where and what is subconsciousness?
Better is it silently to gaze wide-eyed, sincere, perplexed into the omnipresent I-do-not-know, than to squirrel gyrate in the old vicious circle, or to cob-web life-deep chaos with verbiage, subterfuge, and explanations that do not explain.
Blenheim, cumulatively at least, stands for the first and fatal blow that fortune dealt to her fair haired favorite Louis le Grand. The treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714) were an appalling humiliation to the Grand Monarch who had imperiously dictated the conditions of Aix-la-Chapelle and Nimeguen.
“There are no longer any Pyrenees”, said Louis XIV., arbiter of Europe, as his grandson, a boy of seventeen, was raised to the throne as Philip V. of Spain. And then all Europe flew to arms and for thirteen years blood flowed and war dogs killed one another because that boy was on the throne and Louis’ witty words had razed the Pyrenees.
This war is known as the War of the Spanish Succession. A second Grand Alliance was formed; England, Holland, Sweden, Savoy, Austria fought against France. The famous English general, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy, in the service of the Emperor, won the memorable battles, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
The allies chose for the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles, of Austria, the second son of the Emperor Leopold I.; but when after ten years’ fighting there was a vacancy in the imperial line and Archduke Charles suddenly became Emperor of Austria, the allies, fearing the preponderance of Austria in European affairs, withdrew their claim. Philip V. grandson of Louis XIV., was permitted to remain upon the throne of Spain.
The war ended disadvantageously for France. Philip V. was obliged to renounce his claims to the succession in France, so that France and Spain might never be under the same monarch; and thus by miracle-words the august Pyrenees were reinstated (of course they had been deeply disturbed and were, in consequence, duly grateful!); England obtained Gibraltar and the island Minorca; the Duke of Savoy was rewarded with the island Sicily, and Austria obtained Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and part of the Netherlands.
Thirteen years of bloodshed for the whim of an ambitious old man! And thousands fell on both sides, who if questioned, could not honestly have told why they were killing one another.
“‘Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for?’
Young Peterkin he cries,
While little Wilhelmine looks up
with wonder waiting eyes.”
* * * * *
“‘It was the English’, Caspar said,
Who put the French to rout,
But what they fought each other for—
I couldn’t well make out:
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.”
—Southey.
And the world is as fatuous as Southey’s old “Caspar”, and we of the awakening twentieth century are sorely perplexed “Peterkins”. Why must things like that be; and why do men speak of successful human slaughter as a “famous victory”; and why do martial music and blare of trumpet and drum and epaulettes and ribbons and medals and barbaric pomp in general—succeed in silencing the death groans and in hiding from view the bloody agonies and the demon horrors of the battlefield?
“Why ’twas a very wicked thing”
Quoth little Wilhelmine.
“Nay, nay, my little girl”, said he,
“It was a famous victory.”
“But what good came of it at last”?
* * * * *
“Why, that I cannot tell”, said he,
“But ’twas a famous victory.”
And the voice of the questioning child is lost in answerless fatuity. When will the world hear and honestly answer?