The combat deepens. On, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave!
Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry!

These lines come from Thomas Campbell’s narrative poem “Hohenlinden,” written in the wake of the French Revolutionary Wars. Campbell evokes the Battle of Hohenlinden (3 December 1800), fought in a snowstorm near Munich, where French forces under General Moreau defeated an Austrian-led army (including Bavarian contingents). The poem dramatizes the battle’s mounting intensity and the spectacle of massed cavalry and banners, using Munich as a metonym for the Bavarian/Austrian side being driven into the fight. Campbell, writing from Britain, was not an eyewitness; the piece is a Romantic-era reimagining of contemporary European warfare meant to stir awe and dread at its scale.

Campbell compresses the psychology of battle into a few urgent commands: as the “combat deepens,” the fighters are urged forward toward the stark alternatives of “glory or the grave.” The rhetoric is deliberately martial—imperatives, exclamation, and pageantry (“banners,” “chivalry”)—yet the poem’s larger effect is double-edged. The language of honor and medieval “chivalry” heightens the drama, but it also exposes how war converts human lives into symbols and spectacle. The line’s momentum mimics a charge, while the binary outcome underscores the fatalism of mass combat, where heroism and death are inseparable possibilities.