Loneliest of all, with a loneliness which perpetually haunts me whenever I write of it, is that battlefield which I know best and have most closely studied. It is the battlefield on which, as I believe, more was done to affect both military and general history than on any other—the battlefield of Wattignies. Here the Revolution certainly stood, to go under with the fall of Maubeuge, which was at the last gasp for food, or, with the raising of that siege, to go forward. By the success at Wattignies the siege was raised. In military history also it is of great account, for at Wattignies for the first time the great mind of Carnot, the darting, aquiline mind of that man whose school of tactics produced Napoleon, first dealt with an army. At Wattignies for the first time the concentration at the fullest expense of fatigue, of overwhelming force upon one point of the objective, came into play and was successful. Such tactics needed the Infantry which as a fact were used in their development. Still, they were new. Now, Wattignies, where so much was done to change the art of war and to transform Europe, is as lonely as anything on earth. Lines of high trees, a wood almost uncultivated (a rare thing in France), a swept, wintry upland without a house or a barn, a little huddled group of poor steadings round a tiny church, and against it all the while rain and hard weather driving from the French plains below: that is Wattignies. Up through those sunken ways by which Duquesnoy’s division charged you will not meet a single human being, and that heath over which the emigrant nobles countercharged for the last time under the white flag is similarly bereft of men. Nowhere do you more feel the unnatural loneliness of those haunted places of honour than in this which I believe to be the chief one of all the European fields.
Novissima Hora
TIME, which is to the mind a function of the mind, stretches and contracts, as all men know, when the mind impelled by forces not its own demands the expansion or the lessening of time. Thus in a moment, as the foolish physicists can prove, long experiences of dreams are held; and thus hours upon hours of other men’s lives are lost to us for ever when we lie in profound sleep; and I knew a man who, sleeping through a morning upon the grassy side of a hill many years ago, slept through news that seemed to have ruined him and his, and slept on to a later moment when the news proved false and the threat of disaster was lifted; during those hours of agony there had been for him no time.
They say that with men approaching dissolution some trick of time is played, or at least that when death is very near indeed the whole scale and structure of thought changes, just as some have imagined (and it is a reasonable suspicion) that the common laws governing matter do not apply to it in some last stage of tenuity, so the ordered sequence of the mind takes on something fantastic and moves during such moments in a void.
So must it have been with that which I will now describe.
A man lay upon a bed of a common sort in a room which was bare of ornament. But he had forgotten the room. He was a man of middle age, corpulent, and one whose flesh and the skin of whose flesh had sagged under disease. His eyes were closed, his mouth, which was very fine, delicate, and firm, alone of his features preserved its rigour. Those features had been square and massive, their squareness and their strength the more emphasised by the high forehead with its one wisp of hair. But though the strength of character remained behind the face, the muscular strength had left it, for that body had suffered agony.
The man so lying was conscious of little; the external world was already beyond his reach. He knew that somehow he was not suffering pain, and the mortal fatigue that oppressed him had, in that unexpected absence of pain, some opportunity for repose. Neither his room nor what was left of companionship round him, nor the voices that he knew and loved, nor those others that he knew too well and despised, reached his senses. For many years the air in which he had lived and in which he was now perishing had been to him in his captivity a mournful delight. It was a tropical air, but enlivened by the freshness of the sea and continually impelled in great sea winds above him. Now he felt that air no longer, and might have been so many thousand miles away in the place where he had been born, or many thousand miles more, in the snows of a great campaign, or under the violent desert sun of certain remembered battles; it was all one to him, for he only held to life by one thread within, and outer things had already left him.