University of Virginia Library

There lies a plain in Belgic land beside
War's nursling, Brussels; heavy fields divide
Two gentle slopes that ridge the vale between,
And on each flank a forest wraps the scene.
'Tis holy ground; it is the grave of war;
'Tis yearly hallowed; children come from far,
And weep upon the consecrated sod
Such tears as follow blood; 'tis gently trod
By all the great with awfulness; and there
The skies more solemn roll, such sepulchre
Rises to meet them; there the cloud and sun
Have stranger issues, and the whitening moon
More mutely melancholy muses there;
For shrouding terror still enwraps the lair
Of such a deed: this grandeur is for us,
There stands the lion on our tumulus.

And there are laid in sleep, as day is done
(Ligny was lost, and Quatre Bras was won),
Two mighty hosts; the rain-cloud o'er them broods,
And night falls on them; those dark solitudes
Are full of slumberous life; the watch-fires glare
On readied cannon through the foggy air.
Death waits the morning in these lists prepared;
Here meet at last the champions who have shared
The world's renown between them—Europe's scourge,
Spain's liberator; both of them shall merge
All other opposition in this fate:
Round each of them their paladins await,
Those iron souls whom they to arms had trained;
And their tired armies sleep; by sleep unchained
To vision each the other's mighty deeds.

The fateful morning breaks; the dark recedes,
The camp fires die; the expectant shudder runs
Through moveless ranks; the bravest warrior shuns
The dreadful moment ere the work begin.
Oh, countryment, I tell you, lose or win,
That such another moment never shook
Time's hour-glass; never such another look
Of doubtful Mars so horrent, ere it booms,
The iron bell of battle; ere the drums
Throb, and the fifes shrill, and exultantly
The flame of battle lights the soldier's eye.
Yet tender were your hearts, my countrymen,
As was your courage dauntless. Who can pen
With undimmed eye that scene before the fray,
When ye embraced as brothers, with the bray
Of death within your ears, and kissed, and gave
Last words and gifts for those beyond the wave,
If he survived who took them: tender, true,
Loyal; how he would dare full well ye knew,
Who led your ranks, and well ye knew the foe.

How then stood England now let England know;
How stood our fathers then, when death and fame
Made covenant within the battle flame;
How stood they in the whirlwind of that fight.

They stood unmoved, when on the adverse height
The great Opposer gathered in his hands
Thunder and cloud, its shade; made firm the bands
Of massive columns ordered for attack,
And in his art, as masking these, made slack
His swarms of skirmishers; as great was he,
Be it not doubted, in his strategy,
As ever upon Austrian battle-plain:
Nor e'er did army labour to sustain
Its old renown as the vast host he led:
Filled were its ranks with traitors perjurèd,
Who had for him forsworn their lawful king;
With desperate gamblers, who their all did fling
With his great cast for empire: needs must they
In this prodigious hazard fiercely play,
Now, as with clashing music, and the storm
Of louder shouts, the battle line they form
In splendid show, as if the very sight
Of their bold marshalling with dread should smite.
No clashing music led our fathers on;
Less splendidly in arms their cohorts shone.

They stood when first the opened cannonade
Lifted death's shroud to heaven from field and glade;
They stood when in a gloom of fire the bolts
Whole ranks in pieces dashed; the soul revolts
To watch their patient ranks, still formed anew
As death dissolves them: fewer stand the few.

They stood, they knelt, upon the bloody sod,
Lifting the prayer of battle unto God:
Each square so thinning as the day wore on
Was filled with martyrs who by blood atone
Sad earth with heaven. Others have dared to die,
In headlong charge; others as steadfastly
Have stood behind entrenchment and stone wall:
They on the naked earth dared stand and fall,
Gathered in islet squares so small and few.

They stood, while all the daylong battle through
Each act of war upon their front was tried:
While dragon-breathèd guns sent thick and wide
Their furious tempest, doubling stroke on stroke;
While came assailing columns through the smoke
Weighty and vast, in densest order pressed,
And crushing forward up the hilly crest;
While the mailed horsemen, riding thousands strong
In constant onset poured the vale along;
Riding in thousands, never prouder flower
Of chivalry in battle-bed did bower;
Striving by steel, by force, by weight, to hew
Their passage through those islet squares so few.
For all our centre was one tossing sea
Of plumèd horsemen, and all furiously
For three long hours the battle spray arose
Where round the scarce-seen squares the riders close:
The battle glory there, the yellow drift,
The steel-blue sea of weapons, wildly swift,
Its long and deadly billows doth outpour;
So that he said, who ruled that desperate hour,
That the defence full soon must buried be
In ruin; sore amazed was he to see
The inundating charges still subside,
And still the rocks emerge from out the dying tide.

They stood while all the daylong battle raged
In such a wise; those two grand peers engaged
Each art of war, and still Napoleon gained
No mastery, though his army's blood had rained;
For each assailing column had been rent,
Those flooding charges all were vainly spent.
There came with eve a lull; each furious gun
A moment intermitted, as the sun
Went sadly westward; will he leave the fight
Ere upon total ruin sink the night?
Not so; too savagely the battle lowers:
The Guards remain, the latest of his powers,
The breakers of resistance, they who tamed
The Russian and the German, and were named
The proudest soldiers in that warrior day;
The grand reserve that still inclined the fray,
When all was desperate; that still was cast
A thunderbolt the dreadest and the last;
The Guards; he cannot fly while these remain.

They stood—our fathers—when the bloody plain
Grew black with that vast phalanx; still they stood,
As calm as he who ruled their attitude,
As awfully reserved; and, lo, their foes
Are midway now the valley, now they close,
And mount the slope with England's battle lined;
Serried, enormous, black, they come; the wind
Bears upward their stern shouting; bristling arms
And flashing step, they come. The deep alarms
Of our concentric fire proclaims how high
The danger; each cleared volley shows more nigh;
Though death consumes the mighty column's head,
They come, and still with dauntless ranks they thread
The dreadful open where the volleys meet,
And make one street of fire, with death to choke that street.
Still they re-form beyond it, grim and stern—
Still recommence their march; they almost turn
Our hill-crest; they are here! Behold them now,
Behold the pallid frowning of their brow
Beneath the giant bearskin shaking o'er it;
The waving eagle see; 'tis they who bore it
Through Austerlitz and Jena, every breast
Crossed with the belt where honour's star doth rest.
Their graspèd bayonets see; behold them here.

They paused an instant, as in wondering fear:
Is opposition dead? They do but see
An empty space before them. Can it be
That England's line is pierced, the battle done?
Who knows not how that moment great was won?
How at our captain's voice from covert sprung
Our fathers, they who all the day had clung
To that contested hill; how, overborne
By one fierce charge, struggling, confounded, torn,
The mighty hostile column paused at last,
Was huddled as a cloud by sudden blast,
And fled? who knows not in a moment more
How all was lost? Our shouting legions pour
Down that all-bloody slope which they had held.
Came Prussia from the wood with guns that knelled
Vengeance, and pounded into utter rout
Into the deepening night they stagger out:
All lost, Napoleon turned his rein, and fled.

Yet who is victor here? Behold the dead
Rolled on the clammy sod; the victor see—
Death, Death! his form arises solemnly
In that wide reek that labours into air,
As leaves the rout the scene of their despair;
Victors and vanquished leave it, Death remains.
His sulphurous shroud floats from the battle plains,
And in it, thinning toward the darkened stars,
His face smiles downward; many dropping scars
And bloody locks o'erhang its features vast;
Gloating and swollen it dissolved and passed.
Falls weeping night; the smoke of Huguemont
Grows lurid in the dark; then wildly haunt
The hideous scene white flames that slowly creep,
By fearful women borne, from heap to heap.
Some come with knives to butcher them that cry,
Some with death-shriek to faint on them that die.
Far range the hills of death; the weakly moon
Rains ashen light upon the ruin strewn:
The dreadful mounds of relics of the slain,
The headlong horses tumbled down amain,
The limbs that seem to struggle yet, the gleam
On pallid forms, the black mysterious stream
That never came from heaven: there, as by fits
The light falls on them, one in fierceness knits
His unrelenting brows; some clench their hands
And almost strike again with moveless brands;
Some smile like infants; some their glassy eyes
Appealing lift for ever to the skies:
Ah, Death, thou hast reservèd these to be
Thy true spectators more than those who see.
Put out the torches, ere they fade away
In the cold dawning of another day.
This the last battle; this, O fate! thy due;
Thy victory this, O grave! thy cost, O Waterloo!