a prolonged whinny. This must surely arouse the sleeper, and he fixes
his eyes on the impassive countenance with an almost human expression
of anxiety and entreaty. All in vain, and in another moment the flames
and smoke will envelop them, and soon nothing will remain to show
where they fell.

This is the story we read in our picture of War. There is nothing here
to tell us whether the fallen riders are among the victors or the
vanquished. We do not care to know, for in either case their fate is
equally tragic. It was England's iron duke who said "Nothing except
a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

[Illustration: Fr. Hanfstaengl, photo. John Andrew & Son, Sc.
WAR
_National Gallery, London_]

Various small touches in the composition add to the significance of
the scene. Fresh flowers among the heaps of stones show how recently
there was a smiling garden where now all is so ghastly. On the ground
lie an embroidered saddle-cloth, a bugle, and a sword, emblems of the
military life.

It is said that the horrors of war have never yet been faithfully
portrayed. Those who have lived through the experience are unwilling
to recall it, while those who draw upon their imaginations must fall
short of the reality. Whenever any powerful imagination comes
somewhere near the truth, people turn away shocked, unable to endure
the spectacle.[17] Even this picture is almost too painful to
contemplate, yet it selects only a single episode from a battlefield
strewn with scenes of equal horror.

[Footnote 17: As when the exhibition of Verestschagin's pictures was
forbidden.]

Landseer had himself seen nothing of war. The Napoleonic wars had
ended in his childhood and the Crimean war was still ten years in the
future. It was in the quiet interim of the early reign of Victoria
when the picture was painted. The object was to emphasize by contrast
the blessings of peace illustrated in the companion picture. As in
Peace we have a delightful sense of light, space, and liberty, in War
we have a suffocating sense of darkness, limitation, and horror.

Of the many tragedies of the battlefield, naturally the sort which
would most appeal to Landseer's imagination would be the relations
between horses and their riders. Always in close sympathy with animal
life, he had a keen sense of the suffering which the horses undergo in
the stress of conflict. The real hero of our picture is the horse.

In an artistic sense