Book 5 — CHAPTER XII. THE BATTLE-FIELD OF PONTE NUOVO.

I left Morosaglia before Ave Maria, to descend the hills to Ponte Nuovo. Near the battle-field is the post-house of Ponte alla Leccia, where the Diligence from Bastia arrives after midnight, and with it I intended to return to Bastia.

The evening was beautiful and clear—the stillness of the mountain solitude stimulated thought. The twilight is here very short. Hardly is Ave Maria over when the night comes.

I seldom hear the bells pealing Ave Maria without remembering those verses of Dante, in which he refers to the softened mood that descends with the fall of evening on the traveller by sea or land:—

A single cypress stands yonder on the hill, kindled by the red glow of evening, like an altar taper. It is a tree that suits the hour and the mood—an Ave Maria tree, monumental as an obelisk, dark and mournful. Those avenues of cypresses leading to the cloisters and burying-grounds in Italy are very beautiful. We have the weeping-willow. Both are genuine churchyard trees, yet each in a way of its own. The willow with its drooping branches points downwards to the tomb, the cypress rises straight upwards, and points from the grave to heaven. The one expresses inconsolable grief, the other believing hope. The symbolism of trees is a significant indication of the unity of man and nature, which he constantly draws into the sphere of his emotions, to share in them, or to interpret them. The fir, the laurel, the oak, the olive, the palm, have all their higher meaning, and are poetical language.

I saw few cypresses in Corsica, and these of no great size; and yet such a tree would be in its place in this Island of Death. But the tree of peace grows here on every hand; the war-goddess Minerva, to whom the olive is sacred, is also the goddess of peace.

I had fifteen miles to walk from Morosaglia, all the way through wild, silent hills, the towering summits of Niolo constantly in view, the snow-capped Cinto, Artiga, and Monte Rotondo, the last named nine thousand feet in height, and the highest hill in Corsica. It stood bathed in a glowing violet, and its snow-fields gleamed rosy red. I had already been on its summit, and recognised distinctly, to my great delight, the extreme pinnacle of rock on which I had stood with a goatherd. When the moon rose above the mountains, the picture was touched with a beauty as of enchantment.

Onwards through the moonlight and the breathless silence of the mountain wilds; not a sound to be heard, except sometimes the tinkling of a brook; the rocks glittering where they catch the moonlight like wrought silver; nowhere a village, nor a human soul. I went at hap-hazard in the direction where I saw far below in the valley the mists rising from the Golo. Yet it appeared to me that I had taken a wrong road, and I was on the point of crossing through a ravine to the other side, when I met some muleteers, who told me that I had taken not only the right but very shortest road to my destination.

At length I reached the Golo. The river flows through a wide valley; the air is full of fever, and is shunned. It is the atmosphere of a battle-field—of the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo. I was warned in Morosaglia against passing through the night-mists of the Golo, or staying long in Ponte alla Leccia. Those who wander much there are apt to hear the ghosts beating the death-drum, or calling their names; they are sure at least to catch fever, and see visions. I believe I had a slight touch of the last affection, for I saw the whole battle of the Golo before me, the frightful monk, Clemens Paoli in the thickest of it, with his great fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows, his rosary in the one hand, and his firelock in the other, crying mercy on the soul of him he was about to shoot. Wild flight—wounded—dying!

"The Corsicans," says Peter Cyrnæus, "are men who are ready to die." The following is a characteristic trait:—A Frenchman came upon a Corsican who had received his death-wound, and lay waiting for death without complaint. "What do you do," he asked, "when you are wounded, without physicians, without hospitals?" "We die!" said the Corsican, with the laconism of a Spartan. A people of such manly breadth and force of character as the Corsicans, is really scarcely honoured by comparison with the ancient heroic nations. Yet Lacedæmon is constantly present to me here. If it is allowable to say that the spirit of the Hellenes lives again in the wonderfully-gifted people of Italy, this is mainly true, in my opinion, as applied to the two countries—and they are neighbours of each other—of Tuscany and Corsica. The former exhibits all the ideal opulence of the Ionic genius; and while her poets, from Dante and Petrarch to the time of Ariosto, sang in her melodious language, and her artists, in painting, sculpture, and architecture, renewed the days of Pericles; while her great historians rivalled the fame of Thucydides, and the philosophers of her Academy filled the world with Platonic ideas, here in Corsica the rugged Doric spirit again revived, and battles of Spartan heroism were fought.

The young Napoleon visited the battle-field of the Golo in the year 1790. He was then twenty-one years old; but he had probably seen it before when a boy. There is something fearfully suggestive in this: Napoleon on the first battle-field that his eyes ever lighted on—a stripling, without career, and without stain of guilt, he who was yet to crimson a hemisphere—from the ocean to the Volga, and from the Alps to the wastes of Lybia—with the blood of his battle-fields.

It was a night such as this when the young Napoleon roamed here on the field of Golo. He sat down by the river, which on that day of battle, as the people tell, rolled down corpses, and ran red for four-and-twenty miles to the sea. The feverous mist made his head heavy, and filled it with dreams. A spirit stood behind him—a red sword in its hand. The spirit touched him, and sped away, and the soul of the young Napoleon followed the spirit through the air. They hovered over a field—a bloody battle was being fought there—a young general is seen galloping over the corpses of the slain. "Montenotte!" cried the demon; "and it is thou that fightest this battle!" They flew on. They hover over a field—a bloody battle is fighting there—a young general rushes through clouds of smoke, a flag in his hand, over a bridge. "Lodi!" cried the demon; "and it is thou that fightest this battle!" On and on, from battle-field to battle-field. They halt above a stream; ships are burning on it; its waves roll blood and corpses. "The Pyramids!" cries the demon; "this battle too thou shalt fight!" And so they continue their flight from one battle-field to another; and, one after the other, the spirit utters the dread names—"Marengo! Austerlitz! Eylau! Friedland! Wagram! Smolensk! Borodino! Beresina! Leipzig!" till he is hovering over the last battle-field, and cries, with a voice of thunder, "Waterloo! Emperor, thy last battle!—and here thou shalt fall!"

The young Napoleon sprang to his feet, there on the banks of the Golo, and he shuddered; he had dreamt a mad and a fearful dream.

Now that whole bloody phantasmagoria was a consequence of the same vile exhalations of the Golo that were beginning to take effect on myself. In this wan moonlight, and on this steaming Corsican battle-field, if anywhere, it must be pardonable to have visions. Above yon black, primeval, granite hills hangs the red moon—no! it is the moon no longer, it is a great, pale, bloody, horrid head that hovers over the island of Corsica, and dumbly gazes down on it—a Medusa-head, a Vendetta-head, snaky-haired, horrible. He who dares to look on this head becomes—not stone, but an Orestes seized by madness and the Furies, so that he shall murder in headlong passion, and then wander from mountain to mountain, and from cavern to cavern, behind him the avengers of blood and the sleuthhounds of the law that give him no moment's peace.

What fantasies! and they will not leave me! But, Heaven be praised! there is the post-house of Ponte alla Leccia, and I hear the dogs bark. In the large desolate room sit some men at a table round a steaming oil-lamp; they hang their heads on their breasts, and are heavy with sleep. A priest, in a long black coat, and black hat, is walking to and fro; I will begin a conversation with the holy man, that he may drive the vile rout of ghosts and demons out of my head.

But although this priest was a man of unshaken orthodoxy, he could not exorcise the wicked Golo-spirit, and I arrived in Bastia with the most violent of headaches. I complained to my hostess of what the sun and the fog had done to me, and began to believe I should die unlamented on a foreign shore. The hostess said there was no help unless a wise woman came and made the orazion over me. However, I declined the orazion, and expressed a wish to sleep. I slept the deepest sleep for one whole day and a night. When I awoke, the blessed sun stood high and glorious in the heavens.