audience, not afraid here and there to throw out a vague ‘etc.’ when the rest of the sentence is too obvious to state; always plain of speech, never self-assertive, and taking care above all things never to force the note.  His famous description of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme is certainly the finest example of this side of his art.  Here he produces an indelible impression by a series of light touches applied with unerring skill.  Unlike Zola, unlike Tolstoi, he shows us neither the loathsomeness nor the devastation of a battlefield, but its insignificance, its irrelevant detail, its unmeaning grotesquenesses and indignities, its incoherence, and its empty weariness.  Remembering his own experience at Bautzen, he has made his hero—­a young Italian impelled by Napoleonic enthusiasm to join the French army as a volunteer on the eve of the battle—­go through the great day in such a state of vague perplexity that in the end he can never feel quite certain that he really was at Waterloo.  He experiences a succession of trivial and unpleasant incidents, culminating in his being hoisted off his horse by two of his comrades, in order that a general, who has had his own shot from under him, might be supplied with a mount; for the rest, he crosses and recrosses some fields, comes upon a dead body in a ditch, drinks brandy with a vivandiere, gallops over a field covered with dying men, has an indefinite skirmish in a wood—­and it is over.  At one moment, having joined the escort of some generals, the young man allows his horse to splash into a stream, thereby covering one of the generals with muddy water from head to foot.  The passage that follows is a good specimen of Beyle’s narrative style: 

En arrivant sur l’autre rive, Fabrice y avait trouve les generaux tout seuls; le bruit du canon lui sembla redoubler; ce fut a peine s’il entendit le general, par lui si bien mouille, qui criait a son oreille: 

     Ou as-tu pris ce cheval?

     Fabrice etait tellement trouble, qu’il repondit en Italien:  l’ho
     comprato poco fa. (Je viens de l’acheter a l’instant.)

     Que dis-tu? lui cria le general.

Mais le tapage devint tellement fort en ce moment, que Fabrice ne put lui repondre.  Nous avouerons que notre heros etait fort peu heros en ce moment.  Toutefois, la peur ne venait chez lui qu’en seconde ligne; il etait surtout scandalise de ce bruit qui lui faisait mal aux oreilles.  L’escorte prit le galop; on traversait une grande piece de terre labouree, situee au dela du canal, et ce champ etait jonche de cadavres.

How unemphatic it all is!  What a paucity of epithet, what a reticence in explanation!  How a Romantic would have lingered over the facial expression of the general, and how a Naturalist would have analysed that ‘tapage’!  And yet, with all their efforts, would they have succeeded in conveying that singular impression of disturbance, of cross-purposes, of hurry, and of ill-defined fear, which Beyle with his quiet terseness has produced?