How trivial, to the author of the book of Job, would have seemed the noise of the captains and the shouting!  We cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some mightier counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene, when “an earthquake reeled unheededly away:”  Nemo pugnantium senserit, avers Livy.  But nothing is said of it.  The old heroes died in silence, like the wolf “biting hard among the dying dogs.”

A well-known essay of a modern poet beautifully uses this piece of the modern machinery of his craft.  Dryden here makes distance mellow the thunder of a naval fight into a musical undertone.  The great sea-fight between the duke of York and the Dutch, fought within hearing of London, left “the town almost empty” of its anxious citizens, whose “dreadful suspense would not allow them to rest at home,” but drew them into the eastern fields and suburbs, “all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.”  Dryden and three friends took a barge and descended the river.  Once clear of the crowded port above Greenwich, “they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and then, every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the noise of distant thunder or of swallows in a chimney; those little undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror which they had between the fleets.  After they had attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his head and taking notice of it, was the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation’s victory.”

This, the eloquent eolian music of distant and unseen battle, was unheard by the ancient cities and their chroniclers and poets.  It will grow again less familiar as rifled ordnance is introduced, with its thinner and sharper style of expression.  Waterloo appears to have been heard farther than Sedan or Metz, although its pieces were but popguns compared with those that spoke the requiem of the Third Napoleon.  And perhaps, if we allow for smallness in number and calibre, those employed by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Werewater in 1327—­said to be the first recorded occasion in Europe—­were more vociferous than their successors of to-day.  Few and cumbrous they must indeed have been, since Edward III. could only bring four into the field at Crecy; and they did far less service than the twanging cloth-yard shaft in deciding the event of that conflict.

It was not till centuries later that the rifle perceptibly exerted its treble voice in the multitudinous debates of the ultima ratio.  Shrill as John Randolph’s, its pipe, once set up, was very attentively and respectfully listened to.  Like his, it spoke from the woods of America.  “Stand your ground, my brave fellows,” shouted Colonel Washington under the sycamores of the Monongahela on the 9th of July, 1755, “and draw your sights for the honor of old Virginia!” The colonial rifle covered the retreat of the British queen’s-arm, if retreat such a rout as Braddock’s could be called.