WHOEVER has had occasion, whether for study or for curiosity, to visit many of the battlefields of Europe, must have been especially struck by their silence. There are many things combining to produce this impression, but when all have been accounted for, something over remains. Thus it is true that in any countryside the contrast between the noise of the great fight that fills one’s mind and the natural calm of woods and of fields must penetrate the mind; and, again, it is evident that any piece of land which one closely examines, noting all its details for the purposes of history, must seem more lonely and deserted than those general views in which the eye comprehends so much of the work of man; because all this special watching of particular corners, noting of ranges and the rest, make one’s progress slow, keep one’s eyes close fixed to things more or less near, and thus allow one to appreciate how far between men are save in the towns. But there is more than this. It can be proved that there is more. For the same sense of complete loneliness does not take a man in other similar work. He does not feel it when he is surveying for a map nor when he is searching for an historic site other than that of battle. But the battlefields are lonely. [277]Some few, especially in this crowded island, are not lonely. Life has overtaken them, spreading outwards from the towns. By what a curious irony, for instance, the racecourse at Lewes, with a shouting throng of men as the horses go by, corresponds precisely to the place where must have been the thickest of the advance on Montfort’s right as he led them to attack the King. Evesham is not lonely. Battle is full of houses and of villas, and the chief centre of the fight is in a garden.
But for the most part the great battlefields are lonely; and their loneliness is unnatural and oppressive. In some way they repel men. Trasimene is the lonely shore of a marsh. One would imagine that a place so famous would be in some way visited. One of the great sewers of cosmopolitan travel runs close by; one would imagine that the historic interest of the place would bring men from that railway to the shore upon which so very nearly the Orientals destroyed us. There is no such publicity. Sitting at evening near those reeds, where the great fight was fought, one has a feeling, rare in Italy, commoner in the north, of complete isolation. There is nothing but water and the evening sky, and it is so mournful that one might imagine it a place to which things doomed would come to die.
Roncesvalles, which means so little in the military history of Europe and so much in her literature, is a profound gorge, cleft right into the earth 3000[278] feet, and clothed with such mighty beech woods that for these alone, apart from its history, one might imagine it to be perpetually visited. It is not visited. No house is near it, save the huddled huts round the gloomy place of pilgrimage upon the farther side of the pass. A silence more profound, a sense of recession more complete, is not to be discovered upon any of the great roads of Europe—for one of the great roads goes by the place where Roland died, but very few travel along it.
Toulouse is popular and noisy; surrounded by so many small market gardens and so busy and humming a Southern life (detestable to quiet men!) that you might think no site near it was touched with loneliness. But there is such a site. It is the crest beyond the city where Wellington’s victory was won. More curious still, Waterloo, at the very gates of Brussels, within a stone’s throw, one may say, of building sites for suburbs, is the only lonely place in its neighbourhood. That valley, or rather that little dip which is so great in military history and yet which did so little to change the general movement of the world, is the one deserted set of fields that you can find for a long way round. And the soil of Belgium, a gridiron of railways, stuffed with industry, a place where one short walk takes you from a town to a town anywhere throughout the little State, is still remarkable for the way in which its battlefields seem to fend off the[279] presence of man. The plateau of Fleurus, the marshy banks of Jemappes, the roll of Neerwinden, all illustrate what I mean.
If one considers in what two places since Christendom was Christendom most was done to save Christendom from destruction, one will fix upon the Catalaunian Fields and upon that low tableland in the fork of the two rivers between Poitiers and Tours. In the first Attila was broken, Asia from th............