the morass on our near left--
the lower point of the D.]

SEMICHORUS I OF RUMOURS [aerial music]

This is the combat of Napoleon's hope,
But not of his assurance! Shrunk in power
He broods beneath October's clammy cope,
While hemming hordes wax denser every hour.

SEMICHORUS II

He knows, he knows that though in equal fight
He stand s heretofore the matched of none,
A feeble skill is propped by numbers' might,
And now three hosts close round to crush out one!

DUMB SHOW

The Leipzig clocks imperturbably strike nine, and the battle which
is to decide the fate of Europe, and perhaps the world, begins with
three booms from the line of the allies. They are the signal for
a general cannonade of devastating intensity.

So massive is the contest that we soon fail to individualize the
combatants as beings, and can only observe them as amorphous drifts,
clouds, and waves of conscious atoms, surging and rolling together;
can only particularize them by race, tribe, and language.
Nationalities from the uttermost parts of Asia here meet those from
the Atlantic edge of Europe for the first and last time. By noon
the sound becomes a loud droning, uninterrupted and breve-like, as
from the pedal of an organ kept continuously down.

CHORUS OF RUMOURS

Now triple battle beats about the town,
And now contracts the huge elastic ring
Of fighting flesh, as those within go down,
Or spreads, as those without show faltering!

It becomes apparent that the French have a particular intention,
the Allies only a general one. That of the French is to break
through the enemy's centre and surround his right. To this end
NAPOLEON launches fresh columns, and simultaneously OUDINOT supports
VICTOR against EUGENE OF WURTEMBERG'S right, while on the other
side of him the cavalry of MILHAUD and KELLERMAN prepares to charge.
NAPOLEON'S combination is successful, and drives back EUGENE.
Meanwhile SCHWARZENBERG is stuck fast, useless in the marshes
between the Pleisse and the Elster.

By three o'clock the Allied centre, which has held out against the
assaults of the French right and left, is broken through by cavalry
under MURAT, LATOUR-MAUBOURG, and KELLERMANN.

The bells of Leipzig ring.

CHORUS OF THE PITIES

Those chimings, ill-advised and premature!
Who knows