Roncesvalles, which means so little in the military history of Europe and so much in her literature, is a profound gorge, cleft right into the earth 3000 feet, and clothed with such mighty beech woods that for these alone, apart from its history, one might imagine it to be perpetually visited. It is not visited. No house is near it, save the huddled huts round the gloomy place of pilgrimage upon the farther side of the pass. A silence more profound, a sense of recession more complete, is not to be discovered upon any of the great roads of Europe--for one of the great roads goes by the place where Roland died, but very few travel along it.
Toulouse is popular and noisy; surrounded by so many small market gardens and so busy and humming a Southern life (detestable to quiet men!) that you might think no site near it was touched with loneliness. But there is such a site. It is the crest beyond the city where Wellington’s victory was won. More curious still, Waterloo, at the very gates of Brussels, within a stone’s throw, one may say, of building sites for suburbs, is the only lonely place in its neighbourhood. That valley, or rather that little dip which is so great in military history and yet which did so little to change the general movement of the world, is the one deserted set of fields that you can find for a long way round. And the soil of Belgium, a gridiron of railways, stuffed with industry, a place where one short walk takes you from a town to a town anywhere throughout the little State, is still remarkable for the way in which its battlefields seem to fend off the presence of man. The plateau of Fleurus, the marshy banks of Jemappes, the roll of Neerwinden, all illustrate what I mean.
If one considers in what two places since Christendom was Christendom most was done to save Christendom from destruction, one will fix upon the Catalaunian Fields and upon that low tableland in the fork of the two rivers between Poitiers and Tours. In the first Attila was broken, Asia from the East; in the second the Mohammedan, Asia from the South. The Catalaunian Fields have a bleakness amazing to the traveller. Nothing perhaps so near so much wealth is so utterly alone. Great folds of empty land that will grow little, that only lately were planted with stunted pine trees that they might at least grow something, weary the eye. One dead straight road, Roman in origin, Gallic in its continuance, drives right across the waste. It is there that the Huns were broken. It is from that point that their sullen retreat eastward was permitted, as was permitted in 1792 the retreat eastward of the Royal Armies from their check in that same plain at Valmy; and Valmy also is intensely lonely, a bare ridge despoiled to-day even of its mill, and the little chapel raised to the soul of Kellerman hides itself away so that you do not see it until you are close upon the place.