Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which had the smallest front for such a number of combatants,--Napoleon's, three quarters of a league, Wellington's, half a league, and seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion established: loss of men at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent; Russian, thirty per cent; Austrian, forty-four per cent: at Wagram, French, thirteen per cent; Austrian, fourteen per cent: at Moskova, French, thirty-seven per cent; Russian, forty-four per cent: at Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per cent: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent; Allies, thirty-one per cent,--total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent, or out of one hundred and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed and wounded. The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains. At night, a sort of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveller walk about it, and listen and dream like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18 lives again, the false monumental hill is levelled, the wondrous lion is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate on the plain, furious galloping crosses the horizon; the startled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, the red light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears, like a death-groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom battle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers; this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is non-existent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stained purple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds and in the darkness, while all the stern heights--Mont St. Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--seem confusedly crowned by hosts of spectres exterminating one another. CHAPTER XVII. OUGHT WATERLOO TO BE APPLAUDED?