Many years had passed away, and the date of the year was--no matter what; but history was telling of a great general who, with consummate wisdom, courage, and skill, and at the cost of numberless nameless lives, gained a great victory, which determined the fate and fortune of a great monarch and a great nation; consequently affecting the fate and fortunes of the world. It entered into minute detail of how his forces were disposed; where lay the right wing, where lay the left; where the cavalry advanced, and how the infantry sustained the attack; how the guns of the artillery played upon the enemy's flank and rear; and how the heavy dragoons rode down the routed forces, and how, finally, the field was covered with the enemy's dead and wounded, while so few of "our own troops" were left for the kite and the carrion crow. Then did history speak of the honors that awaited and rewarded the triumphant hero, of the clamorous homage of his grateful country, and the approving smiles of his grateful monarch; of the _fêtes_, the banquets, the triumphal processions, all in his honor; of the new titles, the lands, estates, and riches poured upon him; of the state and luxury in which he lived: until the tolling of every bell throughout the kingdom, the eight-horse hearse, the mile-long procession, the Dead March in "Saul," and the volley over the grave, announced that a public statue, on a column a hundred feet high, in the largest square of the largest town, was all that could now record the name of the greatest general of the greatest nation in the world.