There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath,
For a time.

These lines come from Thomas Campbell’s narrative poem “Hohenlinden,” written in the wake of the French Revolutionary Wars and inspired by the Battle of Hohenlinden (3 December 1800) in Bavaria, where French forces defeated the Austrians. Campbell, a Scottish poet associated with the early Romantic period, often treated contemporary European warfare in elevated, musical stanzas. In “Hohenlinden,” he dramatizes the eerie pause amid a winter battle—snow, darkness, and the sudden suspension of sound—before the fighting resumes. The quoted moment captures the charged stillness that precedes renewed violence, heightening the poem’s sense of dread and spectacle.

Campbell compresses the psychology of battle into a few stark images. “Silence deep as death” suggests not mere quiet but an annihilating absence—an atmosphere in which life seems already extinguished. That “the boldest held his breath” implies that courage does not cancel fear; even the bravest are physically arrested by anticipation. The clipped “For a time” underscores how temporary such stillness is: it is a suspended instant between volleys, a breath held before catastrophe. The lines exemplify Romantic war-poetry’s fascination with sublime terror, using rhythm and rhyme to make the pause itself feel ominously inevitable.