The rebel yell that resounded in Paris in the summer of 1789 reverberated around Europe for 26 years until it sounded for the last time on the fields of Waterloo. On an overcast summer’s morning on Sunday 18th June, two hundred years ago, over one hundred thousand soldiers prepared to face each other in damp Belgian farmland. More gathered during that “longest day”. When darkness fell, up to fifty thousand of them lay dead or seriously wounded. A British rifleman would later recall: “I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns.”
This song is for all those men who, after these long years of war, never came home.
https://soundcloud.com/user6120518-1/the-song-of-the-soldier-1815.
The Song Of The Soldier
Chaos is majestic in its way. I contemplate this vista of destruction and death with pain and helplessness in my soul.
Red Army Captain Pavel Kovalenko, in All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings, 2011
Before him, he carries noise, and behind him, he leaves tears; death, that dark spirit,
in’s nervy arm doth lie; which, being advanc’d, declines, and then men die.
Volumnia, in Shakespeare’s Corialanus, Act 2, Scene 1.
A new age dawned when the Bastille fell
Twenty six long years ago.
We marched the road of Europe
In the revolution’s glow.
In the floodtide of that revolution,
We bartered our young lives away.
And shoulder to shoulder we stood to arms
And held our foes at bay.
Against the might of empires,
Beyond our wildest dreams,
We fought the professional armies
Of Europe’s old regimes.
And hungry, tired and poorly armed,
We ragged volunteers
Pushed them back in disarray
Far from our own frontiers.
And we talked that time of setting stars
And the twilight of great powers.
And we never once thought that the sun would set
On an empire such as ours’.
But the siren song of liberty
Has lost its golden thrill.
The new age is now stained with blood
And we are marching still.
There came a great adventurer
For whom France was much too small.
As if we’d had not enough of war,
We answered to his call.
He was like a father unto us.
He served his children’s need.
A substitute for politics, for intellect and greed.
But he overreached in pomp and pride
To serve his vanity.
And we, the soldiers of the line,
Paid with our blood his fee.
‘til the whole world turned against us.
It neither forgot nor forgave
We who came to liberate
But stayed on to enslave
And we talked that time of setting stars
And the twilight of great powers.
And we never once thought that the sun would set
On an empire such as ours’.
But the siren song of liberty
Has lost its golden thrill.
The new age is now stained with blood
And we are marching still.
From the dust of Torres Vedras
To the bloodstained Russian snow.
We followed the Eagles loyally.
Never questioned why we go.
‘til the tide of conquest turned abut,
And showed us how it feels
To retrace weary footsteps
With the wolves hard at our heels.
And now we march our final march
On Belgium’s fertile soil.
We see an end to all or pain
And an end to mortal toil.
And the dream which fired us through the years
Has nothing left to yield
But peace that comes from a nameless death
On a confused battlefield.
And we talked that time of setting stars
And the twilight of great powers.
And we never once thought that the sun would set
On an empire such as ours.
But the tyrant song of liberty
Has lost its golden thrill.
The new age is now stained with blood
And we are marching still.
© Paul Hemphill 1984
To historians, Waterloo is one of the great battles of history, a turning point, the beginning of the modern era. It ended the wars that had convulsed Europe – and since the French Revolution, the First French Empire and the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest commanders and statesmen in history. And it ushered in almost half a century of international peace in Europe; no further major conflict occurred until the Crimean War.
This year, many acres of print and gigabytes of data will be spent trawling through the story. Here are two particularly good reviews.
In That Howling Infinite 