This was the longest burial-truce which took place during the siege, and was for this reason selected for special description by the several authors from whom we have quoted: nor will the space thus devoted to an event which had no direct influence on the course of the war be grudged by the reader, to whom one of the most striking peculiarities of modern civilised warfare is thus forcibly brought home.
But for these and similar amenities which the progress of enlightenment has grafted on the sterner and more ruthless practice of older times, war, even now the most fearful of the scourges which desolate the earth, would become once more the reproach of humanity and the jubilee of fiends. Terrible are the smoking ruins of great cities, the abandoned homestead and the desecrated hearth — mournful the necessity which changes to a barren waste the plain once teeming with fertility and smiling with nature's beauty — which bids man, God's image, deface and mar God's image, man — which blights manhood in its prime and promise, cuts off the flower of a nation, and fills a land with wailing; horrible, with a horror wliich no language, however eloquent, can depict, the spectacle presented by a field of battle; yet such, alas! are the ordinary and inevitable accidents of war: but who can conceive what war would be, were the wantonness of destruction permitted to reach its furthest limits, and the fiercest passions of our fallen nature left unchecked save by their own exhaustion?
Nothing, perhaps, has a gentler or more humanizing influence, nothing more tends to soften the rancour and awaken the better feelings of belligerents, than an armistice for burying the dead. Brought face to face with each other while employed in rendering the same pious offices to comrades who have fallen in a cause which both alike deem sacred, the most inveterate foes must for a while recognise the common humanity which clothes them all — must feel that, after all, those whom they met in the deathstruggle yesterday, and those with whom they shall strive for life itself to-morrow, are men of like form and passions with themselves; that the stiff, cold clay, which once answered with an equal hatred to their own defiance, and which is not now more unconscious of hostility or love than they themselves may be, or ere another sun, once in life and energy, gladdened a home perchance as dear and happy as their own; where a sister will mourn the hero of her day-dreams — where a mother's grey hairs may go down with sorrow to the grave — where one dearer than all else on earth may never smile again.
And men, in whom, however faintly, such thoughts as these have been aroused, will not, even when the blood is up and the sword is flashed, forget them — will not refuse the cry for quarter, nor deny the hand of succour nor the voice of comfort to a wounded foe.
Nothing, perhaps, excited the interest and curiosity of our own officers so much as the opportunity afforded them on this occasion of meeting and passing in review those of a corresponding rank in the Russian service. The high bearing and the courteous demeanour of these gentlemen were the theme of universal remark in camp, whenever the incidents of the armistice were discussed: nor were these qualities matter of surprise to those acquainted with the Russian military system. Drawn for the most part from the higher classes, and uniting to the special training required by his profession that mental cultivation and those more graceful accomplishments which, whatever may be said to the contrary, are not inconsistent with the most thorough technical knowledge nor with the most reckless personal daring — the Russian officer is pre-eminently to his men what the human soul is to the human body. The soldiers, drawn in masses from the extremities of the empire, and submitted, from the moment in which they are torn from their homes, to an iron discipline enforced by a harsh and unrestrained use of corporal punishments, become speedily but parts in one vast system, and wheels of one enormous machine, imposing from its bulk and admirable in its adaptation to certain exigencies, but deficient in plasticity and in originative power. It is the officers who breathe the spirit of life into this inanimate form, call forth its latent energies, direct its secret springs, and guide and control its action: it is the officers who change the