The Silence of the Battlefields Whoever has had occasion, whether for study or for curiosity, to visit many of the battlefields of Europe, must have been especially struck by their silence. There are many things combining to produce this impression, but when all have been accounted for, something over remains. Thus it is true that in any countryside the contrast between the noise of the great fight that fills one’s mind and the natural calm of woods and of fields must penetrate the mind; and, again, it is evident that any piece of land which one closely examines, noting all its details for the purposes of history, must seem more lonely and deserted than those general views in which the eye comprehends so much of the work of man; because all this special watching of particular corners, noting of ranges and the rest, make one’s progress slow, keep one’s eyes close fixed to things more or less near, and thus allow one to appreciate how far between men are save in the towns. But there is more than this. It can be proved that there is more. For the same sense of complete loneliness does not take a man in other similar work. He does not feel it when he is surveying for a map nor when he is searching for an historic site other than that of battle. But the battlefields are lonely. Some few, especially in this crowded island, are not lonely. Life has overtaken them, spreading outwards from the towns. By what a curious irony, for instance, the racecourse at Lewes, with a shouting throng of men as the horses go by, corresponds precisely to the place where must have been the thickest of the advance on Montfort’s right as he led them to attack the King. Evesham is not lonely. Battle is full of houses and of villas, and the chief centre of the fight is in a garden. But for the most part the great battlefields are lonely; and their loneliness is unnatural and oppressive. In some way they repel men. Trasimene is the lonely shore of a marsh. One would imagine that a place so famous would be in some way visited. One of the great sewers of cosmopolitan travel runs close by; one would imagine that the historic interest of the place would bring men from that railway to the shore upon which so very nearly the Orientals destroyed us. There is no such publicity. Sitting at evening near those reeds, where the great fight was fought, one has a feeling, rare in Italy, commoner in the north, of complete isolation. There is nothing but water and the evening sky, and it is so mournful that one might imagine it a place to which things doomed would come to die.