But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back, first, to the victoryto the results of all that hard and relentless fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable battlefield north and south of the Somme.

First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual battlefield.

"A wild land of barrenness and lava," Carlyle characterises it, "swallowed up many months of the year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in summer time, towering up there stern and grim, with its snow jokuls and roaring geysers, and horrid volcanic chasms, like the waste chaotic battlefield of frost and fire."

Owen Roe O'Neill had won renown on many continental battlefields, and was admirably fitted by genius and training to lead a national party, not only in council but in the field.

Germans have bled and conquered on countless battlefields in every part of the world, and in late years have shown that the heroism of their ancestors still lives in the descendants.

Like most pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay.

It flickered out in Dom Sebastian, who dragged his country into a mad invasion of Morocco and vanished from human ken on the disastrous battlefield of Alcazar-Khebir.

"Hearts knit in childhood's innocence, Long bound in Hymen's ties, One goes to distant battlefields, One sits at home and sighs.

But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium.

We were well on our road before she came to her senses, and there were moments when I almost wished she might remain dormant until we had passed beyond the gruesome plain that stretches between Barcy and Vareddesnow a historic battlefield.

There were many reasons which influenced him: the sight of that immense battlefield, strewn with the bodies of the slain, the determined resistance of the Austrian soldiers, the difficulties which would have to be faced in the Quadrilateral, the hostile attitude of Prussia, were all motives which combined to sway the French Emperor's mind.

The graves of our men have consecrated these immortal battlefields and our sacred dead will live on in the memory of the republic forever.

It was for Paris that they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits.

Should, in the near future, the long-talked-of invasion of this country by a combination of European powers become an accomplished fact, Englishmen may perchance be glad, as the cannon balls and musket shots are whizzing round their heads, that on the mimic battlefields of cricket, football, polo, and fox-hunting they learnt two of the most useful lessons of lifecoolness and courage.

They also maintained on this miniature battlefield the laws of chivalry and courtesy, giving help to those who needed it.

The plains and hills about Athens were turned into mock battlefields for the training of raw recruits; and young Greeks from all parts of the worldtens of thousands of them from Americapoured in to protect the fatherland and to fight the secular enemy of Europe.

Such is the nearest battlefield to Paris.

For nearly a thousand years it was a perpetual battlefield, and not since the invasion of Alexander the Great have the people enjoyed such liberty or tranquillity as they do today.

Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric battlefield.

All the time I was explaining myself, with that diabolical dual consciousness which makes us spectator and listener to ourselves, in the back of my brainor my soulwas running this query: "I wonder what a raw battlefield looks like?

On that vast battlefield the combatants had numbered three hundred thousand menone hundred sixty thousand Austrians and one hundred forty thousand French and Sardiniansof all these, after that sanguinary struggle, twenty-five thousand were left dead or wounded.

Six years of marriage to Victorthat alone should have been enough, one would think, to metamorphose the fairest face into a blasted battlefield of passions.