side.  Once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our captain told us in low tones that next day we were to go into battle.  He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about duty.  And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the fire-light to see if the rifles were in order.  They would go into fire because duty said, “Save the country!” and when, soon after, the steeply-sloping angle of the enemy’s works came into view, ominously red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one and that one fell, there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap close down and pushed ahead in the skirmish-line, was not thinking of duty.  They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought of duty has always much to do with the going forward of weaponed men amongst the weapons.  Men do fight, no doubt, from mere recklessness, from hope of plunder or glory; and sometimes they have been scourged to it.  But more often, where one in four or five is likely to fall, the nobler motive is uppermost with men and felt with burning earnestness too, which only the breath of the near-at-hand death can fan up.  No! there is reason enough why battle-fields should be, as they are, places of pilgrimage.  The remoteness of the struggle hardly diminishes the interest with which we visit the scene; Marathon is as sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year.  Nor, on the other hand, do we need poetic haze from a century or two of intervening time:  Gettysburg was a consecrated spot to all the world before its dead were buried.  There need be no charm of nature; there are tracts of mere sand in dreary Brandenburg, where old Frederick, with Prussia in his hand, supple and tough as if plaited into a nation out of whip-cord, scourged the world; and these tracts are precious.  On the other hand, the grandest natural features seem almost dwarfed and paltry beside this overmastering interest.  On the top of the Grimsel Pass there is a melancholy, lonely lake which touches the spirit as much as the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring Finster-Aarhorn, the Todten See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags.  Had I defined all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen’s spire or the St. Gotthard.  We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with especial willingness toward battle-fields.  There man is most in earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life.  Theirs are the most momentous decisions for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and solemn.  It is right that the sacrifice they have witnessed should possess an alchemy to make their acres golden.