." The baron, who is a very good authority on the subject,
having previously proved that every plan was laid in the duke's mind,
and Quatre Bras and Waterloo fully detailed, we may comprehend the value
of the sentence. It was the bold, trusting heart of the hero that made
him cheerful. He showed himself cheerful, too, at Waterloo. He was never
very jocose; but on that memorable 18th of June he showed a symptom of
it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and
they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over--when the 21,000
brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death--the
duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face
with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for
this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted
themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to
pieces, or pierced with lances, or hacked with sabers, and lay, like
Ponsonby covered with thirteen wounds, upon the ground. Well might the
duke weep, iron though he was. "There is nothing," he writes, "nothing
in the world so dreadful as a battle lost, unless it be such a battle
won. Nothing can compensate for the dreadful cruelty, carnage, and
misery of the scene, save the reflection on the public good which may
arise from it."

Forty years' peace succeeded the great battle. Forty years of
prosperity, during which he himself went honored to his tomb, rewarded
the constant brave look and tongue which answered his men, when he saw
the whole side of a square blown in, with "Hard work, gentlemen! They
are pounding away! We must see who can pound the longest." It is not too
much to say that the constant cheerfulness of the Duke of Wellington was
one great element of success in the greatest battle ever fought, one of
the fifteen decisive battles in the world, great in the number engaged,
greater in the slaughter, greatest in the results. But all commanders
ought to be cheerful. Gloomy looks do not do in the army. A set of
filibusters or pirates may wear looks and brows as black as the
sticking-plasters boots that their representatives are dressed in at the
minor theaters; but a soldier or a sailor should be, and as a rule is,
the most cheerful of fellows, doing his duty in the trench or the storm,
dying when the bullet comes, but living like a hero the while. Look, for
instance, at the whole-hearted cheerfulness of Raleigh, when