XX.
Now from the dark artillery broke
Lightning flash and thunder stroke;
And cloud on cloud of fiery smoke
Rolls in the darken’d air:
Wrapp’d in its shade, unheard, unseen,
Artful surprise and onset keen
The crafty foes prepare—
Three columns of the flower of France
With rapid step and firm, advance,
At first thro’ tangled ground,
O’er fence and dell and deep ravine;
At length they reach the level green—
The midnight battle’s murderous scene—
The valley’s eastern bound.
There in a rapid line they form,
Thence are just rushing to the storm
By bold Belluno led,
When sudden thunders shake the vale,
Day seems, as if eclipsed, to fail,
The light of heaven is fled;
A dusty whirlwind rides the sky,
A living tempest rushes by
With deafening clang and tread—
‘A charge! a charge!’ the British cry,
‘And Seymour at its head.’
XXI.
Belluno sees the coming storm,
And feels the instant need—
‘Break up the line, the column form,
And break and form with speed,
Or under Britain’s thundering arm
In rout and ruin bleed!’
Quick, as upon the sea-beat sands
Vanish the works of childish hands,
The lengthen’d lines are gone,
And broken into nimble bands
Across the plain they run:
‘Spur, Britain, spur thy foaming horse,
O’ertake them in their scatter’d course,
And sweep them from the land!’
She spurs, she flies; in vain, in vain—
Already they have pass’d the plain,
And now the broken ground they gain,
And now, a column, stand!
‘Rein up thy courser, Britain, rein!’—
But who the tempest can restrain?
The mountain flood command?
Down the ravine, with hideous crash,
Headlong the foremost squadrons dash,
And many a soldier, many a steed
Crush’d in the dire confusion bleed.
The rest, as ruin fills the trench,
Pass clear, and on the column’d French,
A broken and tumultuous throng,
With glorious rashness pour along,
Too prodigal of life;
And they had died, ay every one,
But Wellesley cries, ‘On, Anson, on,
Langworth, and Albuquerque and Payne,
Lead Britain, Hanover, and Spain,
And turn the unequal strife.’
XXII.
Needs it to tell how fierce the flame
Burn’d of that doubtful strife,
Whose precious prize was life, and fame
More precious still than life!—
By France what English hearts were gor’d,
What crests were cleft by Britain’s sword,
When horse and foot infuriate met,
And sabre clash’d with bayonet,
And how they fought and how they fell,
And man and steed, ’midst shout and yell,
The field of carnage strew’d:
It were a tedious tale to tell,
A tedious tale of blood.
But when the fierce and cloudless sun
Blazed from his noontide height,
And ere the field was lost or won,
Worn and unable quite
The hostile stroke to make or shun,
Faint, breathless, all with toil foredone,
They paus’d amid the fight!
Oft, when the midnight tempests sweep
With fiercest fury o’er the deep,
Short, sullen pauses intervene,
And, ev’ry fitful gust between,
The stormy roar is still’d:
Thus was the rage of battle staid,
And clash of bayonet and blade
Subsided o’er the field:
Hush’d was the shout, the tumult laid,
And each receding line obey’d
The truce which weary nature made,
And mutual honour seal’d.
XXIII.
There is a brook, that from its source
High in the rocky hill,
Pours o’er the plain its limpid course,
To pay to Teio’s monarch force
Its tributary rill;
Which, in the peaceful summer-tide,
The swarthy shepherd sits beside,
And loitering, as it rolls along
In cadence pours his rustic song—
Carol of love or pious chaunt,
Or tale of knight and giant gaunt,
And lady captive held;
Or strains, not fabled, of the war,
Where the great champion of Bivar
The Moorish pagan quell’d.
But now, no shepherd loiters there—
He flies, with all his fleecy care,
To mountains high and far,
And starts, and breathless stops to hear
Borne on the breeze, and to his fear
Seeming, at every gust, more near,
The distant roar of war.
XXIV.
But on the streamlet’s margin green
Other than shepherd forms are seen;
And sounds, unlike the rustic song,
The troubled current rolls along;
When, of the cooling wave to taste,
From either host the warriors haste
With busy tread and hum:
You would have thought that streamlet bound
Were listed field or sacred ground
Where battle might not come.
So late in adverse contest tried,
So deep in recent carnage dyed,
To mutual honour they confide
Their mutual fates; nor shrink
To throw the cap and helm aside,
As, mingled o’er the narrow tide,
They bend their heads to drink;
Or, nature’s feverish wants supplied,
Unarm’d, unguarded, side by side,
Safe in a soldier’s faith and pride
They rest them on the brink.
They speak not—in each others phrase
Unskill’d—but yet the thoughts of praise,
And honour to unfold,
The heart has utterance of its own;
And ere the signal trump was blown,
And ere the drum had roll’d,
The honest grasp of manly hands,
That common link of distant lands,
That sign which nature understands,
The generous feeling told:
The high and sacred pledge it gave,
That both were true, and both were brave,
And something added of regret,
At parting when so lately met,
And (not developed quite)
Some dubious hopes of meeting yet
As heaven their devious paths might set,
In friendship or in fight.