The martial poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a good deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these.  The Russians are not unlike us in this respect.  I remember reading of some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest with the song still going.  A spectator inquired what wondrous chant it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was “Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages.”  The fact is, I suppose, that a mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.

Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic with their most serious work.  Take the songs which they sang during the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged—­the only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched to their uttermost and showed their true form—­“Tramp, tramp, tramp,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Marching through Georgia”—­all had a playful humour running through them.  Only one exception do I know, and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall.  Even an outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion.  I mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe’s “War-Song of the Republic,” with the choral opening line:  “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the effect must have been terrific.

A long digression, is it not?  But that is the worst of the thoughts at the other side of the Magic Door.  You can’t pull one out without a dozen being entangled with it.  But it was Scott’s soldiers that I was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his natural range of thought.  What a pity it is that he, with his keen appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries—­the finest, perhaps, that the world has ever seen!  It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career.  How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme?  But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand.  What would we not give for a portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in “Quentin Durward”?