Once upon a time, it matters little when, and in stalwart England,
it matters little where, a fierce battle was fought. It was fought
upon a long summer day when the waving grass was green. Many a
wild flower formed by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for
the dew, felt its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day,
and shrinking dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate colour
from harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying
men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track. The
painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its
wings. The stream ran red. The trodden ground became a quagmire,
whence, from sullen pools collected in the prints of human feet and
horses' hoofs, the one prevailing hue still lowered and glimmered
at the sun.
Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon
that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant rising-ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she rose into
the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned faces that
had once at mothers' breasts sought mothers' eyes, or slumbered
happily. Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the secrets whispered
afterwards upon the tainted wind that blew across the scene of that
day's work and that night's death and suffering! Many a lonely
moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept
mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the
earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn away.
They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in little
things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men, soon
recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty battle-ground as
she had done before, when it was innocent. The larks sang high
above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and flitted to and fro;
the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each other swiftly, over
grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and over roof and church-spire in the nestling town among the trees, away into the bright
distance on the borders of the sky and earth, where the red sunsets
faded. Crops were sown, and grew up, and were gathered in; the
stream that had been crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at
the plough; gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at
work; sheep and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields,
to scare away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; sabbath
bells rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid
creatures of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden,
grew and withered in their destined terms: and all upon the fierce
and bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been
killed in the great fight. But, there were deep green patches in
the growing corn at first, that people looked at awfully. Year
after year they re-appeared; and it was known that underneath those
fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay buried,
indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The husbandmen who
ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms abounding there;
and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a long year, called
the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one ever knew a Battle
Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest Home. For a long
time, every furrow that was turned, revealed some fragments of the
fight. For a long time, there were wounded trees upon the battle-ground; and scraps of hacked and broken fence and wall, where
deadly struggles had been made; and trampled parts where not a leaf
or blade would grow. For a long time, no village girl would dress
her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of
death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries
growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon
the hand that plucked them.
The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as lightly
as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the lapse of time,
even these remains of the old conflict; and wore away such
legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people carried in their
minds, until they dwindled into old wives' tales, dimly remembered
round the winter fire, and waning every year. Where the wild
flowers and berries had so long remained upon the stem untouched,
gardens arose, and houses were built, and children played at
battles on the turf. The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas
logs, and blazed and roared away. The deep green patches were no
greener now than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The
ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of
metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and
those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted
corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long,
that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make
them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a
baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a
moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the
spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly
soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and
window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and
would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and
would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and
would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill,
and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the
rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground,
where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight.
Nowhere more altered, perhaps, about a hundred years ago, than in
one little orchard attached to an old stone house with a
honeysuckle porch; where, on a bright autumn morning, there were
sounds of music and laughter, and where two girls danced merrily
together on the grass, while some half-dozen peasant women standing
on ladders, gathering the apples from the trees, stopped in their
work to look down, and share their enjoyment. It was a pleasant,
lively, natural scene; a beautiful day, a retired spot; and the two
girls, quite unconstrained and careless, danced in the freedom and
gaiety of their hearts.
If there were no such thing as display in the world, my private
opinion is, and I hope you agree with me, that we might get on a
great deal better than we do, and might be infinitely more
agreeable company than we are. It was charming to see how these
girls danced. They had no spectators but the apple-pickers on the
ladders. They were very glad to please them, but they danced to
please themselves (or at least you would have supposed so); and you
could no more help admiring, than they could help dancing. How
they did dance!
Not like opera-dancers. Not at all. And not like Madame Anybody's
finished pupils. Not the least. It was not quadrille dancing, nor
minuet dancing, nor even country-dance dancing. It was neither in
the old style, nor the new style, nor the French style, nor the
English style: though it may have been, by accident, a trifle in
the Spanish style, which is a free and joyous one, I am told,
deriving a delightful air of off-hand inspiration, from the
chirping little castanets. As they danced among the orchard trees,
and down the groves of stems and back again, and twirled each other
lightly round and round, the influence of their airy motion seemed
to spread and spread, in the sun-lighted scene, like an expanding
circle in the water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts,
the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in
the morning air - the flashing leaves, the speckled shadows on the
soft green ground - the balmy wind that swept along the landscape,
glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily - everything between
the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of
land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last
things in the world - seemed dancing too.
At last, the younger of the dancing sisters, out of breath, and
laughing gaily, threw herself upon a bench to rest. The other
leaned against a tree hard by. The music, a wandering harp and
fiddle, left off with a flourish, as if it boasted of its
freshness; though the truth is, it had gone at such a pace, and
worked itself to such a pitch of competition with the dancing, that
it never could have held on, half a minute longer. The apple-pickers on the ladders raised a hum and murmur of applause, and
then, in keeping with the sound, bestirred themselves to work again
like bees.
Up to Podcast Index
