led (as I found afterwards) West
Zuyland, or Zealand, so named perhaps from its situation amid this
inland sea.

Here the King's troops had been quite lately, and their fires were still
burning; but the men themselves had been summoned away by the night
attack of the rebels. Hence I procured for my guide a young man who knew
the district thoroughly, and who led me by many intricate ways to the
rear of the rebel army. We came upon a broad open moor striped with
sullen water courses, shagged with sedge, and yellow iris, and in the
drier part with bilberries. For by this time it was four o'clock, and
the summer sun, rising wanly, showed us all the ghastly scene.

Would that I had never been there! Often in the lonely hours, even now
it haunts me: would, far more, that the piteous thing had never been
done in England! Flying men, flung back from dreams of victory and
honour, only glad to have the luck of life and limbs to fly with,
mud-bedraggled, foul with slime, reeking both with sweat and blood,
which they could not stop to wipe, cursing, with their pumped-out lungs,
every stick that hindered them, or gory puddle that slipped the step,
scarcely able to leap over the corses that had dragged to die. And to
see how the corses lay; some, as fair as death in sleep; with the smile
of placid valour, and of noble manhood, hovering yet on the silent lips.
These had bloodless hands put upwards, white as wax, and firm as death,
clasped (as on a monument) in prayer for dear ones left behind, or in
high thanksgiving. And of these men there was nothing in their broad
blue eyes to fear. But others were of different sort; simple fellows
unused to pain, accustomed to the bill-hook, perhaps, or rasp of the
knuckles in a quick-set hedge, or making some to-do at breakfast, over a
thumb cut in sharpening a scythe, and expecting their wives to make more
to-do. Yet here lay these poor chaps, dead; dead, after a deal of pain,
with little mind to bear it, and a soul they had never thought of; gone,
their God alone knows whither; but to mercy we may trust. Upon these
things I cannot dwell; and none I trow would ask me: only if a plain man
saw what I saw that morning, he (if God had blessed him with the heart
that is in most of us) must have sickened of all desire to be great
among mankind.

Seeing me riding to the front (where the work of death went on among
the men of true English pluck; which, when moved, no farther moves), the
fugitives cal