Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?”
No! the blood of the brave has, no doubt, fertilized the soil of this beautiful valley, while the bodies of heroes, who drew their natal breath on the banks of the Gneiper and the Vistula—the Elbe and the Danube—the Rhine and the Rhone—the Seine and the Tiber, have served to fatten the birds and beasts of prey, as well as the mould of mother-earth—migrating into myriads of new existences, and completing the mysterious circle of the Samian Sage!
When we glance at this infinitessimal speck of human consciousness and identity, surrounded and swallowed up by the countless cycles of other and ephemeral modes of existence, we may well marvel that man—reasoning man—should be the only creature on this globe who wages eternal war—against his own species! One would think that the span of human life was narrow enough, without abridging or annihilating it by fire, famine, and the sword! War indeed is a game which—
——were their subjects wise,
Kings could not play at.
It is rather singular that, in our days, at least, though monarchs occasionally lose their crowns in these games of hazard, they rarely part with their heads at the same time.
Three Emperors and a King played one of those fearful games of hazard in the valley of Culm. From the summit of the Schlossberg the royal Eagles of Austria, Russia, and Prussia beheld, with astonishment, if not dismay, the sudden and unexpected descent through a gorge in the Erzebirge mountains, the fierce, the rapacious, and the ferocious Vandamme, at the head of forty thousand Frenchmen, flushed with the victory of Dresden (27th August, 1813) and pouncing on the scattered troops of the allies in the valley, quite unprepared for such an unexpected onslaught! The “Cock of the North,” and he of the Danube, “immediately retired.” Not so the regal bird, with two heads, from the Elbe and the Oder. He clapped his sable wings, as he snuffed the sulphurous fumes from the roaring cannon—directed several movements of the allies below—and presented a wall of steel, to a cloud of cossacks, flying before the enemy—thus compelling them to face their foes.
Meanwhile, Osterman and his eight thousand Russians slowly and doggedly retreated (fighting) before Vandamme and his forty thousand French, till within two miles of Teplitz, when the Gallic general considered the crowned heads as inevitably within his grasp! Here the Muscovites stopped short—wheeled round—and crossed the narrow valley, like an avenue of knotted oaks that might be borne down or torn up by the furious storm or lightning’s flash, but never would bend. It was in vain that the “ferocious” Vandamme brought up line after line of his men against the northern phalanx. They were repulsed, one after the other, as the basaltic columns of Staffa repel the onsets of the Atlantic surge! As individuals fell in the Russian ranks, the lines instantly closed again, as if by a vital and instinctive movement of the whole body! When the last column of Vandamme had failed to break the Russian phalanx, the furious and disconcerted Frank retreated in his turn, and encamped on the field of Culm for the night. This gave time for the panic-stricken and disordered allies to collect, combine, and arrange for the grand struggle of the coming day. The dawn (30th August) had not yet unveiled the peaks of the surrounding mountains, when all were ready and panting for the sanguinary conflict.
By torch and trumpet soon array’d,
Each horseman drew his battle-blade,