ht have come?

CHORUS OF THE YEARS

The young sleep sound; but the weather awakes
In the veterans, pains from the past that numb;

Old stabs of Ind, old Peninsular aches,
Old Friedland chills, haunt their moist mud bed,
Cramps from Austerlitz; till their slumber breaks.

CHORUS OF SINISTER SPIRITS

And each soul shivers as sinks his head
On the loam he's to lease with the other dead
From to-morrow's mist-fall till Time be sped!

[The fires of the English go out, and silence prevails, save
for the soft hiss of the rain that falls impartially on both
the sleeping armies.]

ACT SEVENTH

SCENE I

THE FIELD OF WATERLOO

[An aerial view of the battlefield at the time of sunrise is
disclosed.

The sky is still overcast, and rain still falls. A green
expanse, almost unbroken, of rye, wheat, and clover, in oblong
and irregular patches undivided by fences, covers the undulating
ground, which sinks into a shallow valley between the French and
English positions. The road from Brussels to Charleroi runs like
a spit through both positions, passing at the back of the English
into the leafy forest of Soignes.

The latter are turning out from their bivouacs. They move stiffly
from their wet rest, and hurry to and fro like ants in an ant-hill.
The tens of thousands of moving specks are largely of a brick-red
colour, but the foreign contingent is darker.

Breakfasts are cooked over smoky fires of green wood. Innumerable
groups, many in their shirt-sleeves, clean their rusty firelocks,
drawing or exploding the charges, scrape the mud from themselves,
and pipeclay from their cross-belts the red dye washed off their
jackets by the rain.

At six o'clock, they parade, spread out, and take up their positions
in the line of battle, the front of which extends in a wavy riband
three miles long, with three projecting bunches at Hougomont, La
Haye Sainte, and La Haye.

Looking across to the French positions we observe that after
advancing in dark streams from where they have passed the night
they, too, deploy and wheel into their fighting places--figures
with red epaulettes and hairy knapsacks, their arms glittering
like a display of cutlery at a hill-side fair.

They assume three concentric lines of crescent shape, that conve