Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/157

Rh lighted matches. Dudley, Oldbury, Albion, and Smethwick, on the right, plied their heavy breachers at the iron-works on the other side, while West Bromwich and distant Walsall showed that their men were standing as bravely to their guns, and that their guns were charged to the muzzle with the grape and canister of the mine. The canals twisting and crossing through the field of battle, showed by patches in the light like bleeding veins. There were no clouds except of smoke over the scene; but there were large strips of darkness floating with crimson fringes into the red sea, on which the white moon rode like an ermined angel of peace.

For all that glowing empire was peace. Peace has her battle-fields as well as war, and this was her Waterloo. Here she had mustered fifty regiments of her veterans, armed with all the weapons of her exhaustless arsenal—with Minié picks and Schneider hammers, and file-edged swords that cut at their sides. Those great-mouthed mortars, belching forth globes of fire, were her huge muzzle-loaders. And all this was the thick of one of her great battles by night—only one of the three hundred a year she fights in that dark valley with the elements. What are all the mines and counter-mines of war compared with the hundreds her sappers have dug fifty fathoms below the visible surface of this battle