War Close At Hand Consists So Largely Of Commonplaces And Trivial
Details That I Hope I May Be Pardoned For Recording The Anxieties And
Cares Of This Lady From Brooklyn.
Her point of view so admirably
illustrates one side of war.
It is only when you are ten years away
from it, or ten thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull
places, and only the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque,
and momentous. We have read, in "Vanity Fair," of the terror and the
mad haste to escape of the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo.
That is the obvious and dramatic side.
That is the picture of war you remember and which appeals. As a
rule, people like to read of the rumble of cannon through the streets
of Ventersburg, the silent, dusty columns of the re-enforcements
passing in the moonlight, the galloping hoofs of the aides suddenly
beating upon the night air and growing fainter and dying away, the
bugle-calls from the camps along the river, the stamp of spurred
boots as the general himself enters the hotel and spreads the blue-
print maps upon the table, the clanking sabres of his staff, standing
behind him in the candle-light, whispering and tugging at their
gauntlets while the great man plans his attack. You must stop with
the British army if you want bugle-calls and clanking sabres and
gauntlets. They are a part of the panoply of war and of warriors.
But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg that night, only a few cattle-
breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had won from
the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of gentleman
adventurers - gathered around a table discussing other days in other
lands. The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the
people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming
in the distance, or as one sees it in "Shenandoah," where aides
gallop on and off the stage and the night signals flash from both
sides of the valley. That is the obvious and dramatic side; the
other side of war is the night before the battle, at Jones's Hotel;
the landlady in the dining-room with her elbows on the table,
fretfully deciding that after a day in front of the cooking-stove she
is too tired to escape an invading army, declaring that the one place
at which she would rather be at that moment was Green's restaurant in
Philadelphia, the heated argument that immediately follows between
the foreign legion and the Americans as to whether Rector's is not
better than the Cafe de Paris, and the general agreement that Ritz
cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being robbed. That
is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle. We heard no
galloping aides, no clanking spurs, only the click of the clipped
billiard balls as the American scouts (who were killed thirty-six
hours later) knocked them about the torn billiard-cloth, the drip,
drip of the kerosene from a blazing, sweating lamp, which struck the
dirty table-cloth, with the regular ticking of a hall clock, and the
complaint of the piano from the hotel parlor, where the correspondent
of a Boston paper was picking out "Hello, My Baby," laboriously with
one finger.
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