Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/78

IN WAR TIME Straight to the father's heart;

And a lonely wanderer stood,

Mazed in a mist of thought,

On the edge of a field of blood.

—For a battle had been fought,

And the cavalry skirmish was but a wild prelude

To the broader carnage that heaped a field in vain:

A terrible battle had been fought,

Till its changeful current brought

Tumultuous, angry surges roaring back

To the lines where our army had lain.

The lawyer, driven hard by an inward pain,

Was crossing, in search of a dying son, the track

Where the deluge rose and fell, and its stranded wrack

Had sown the loathing earth with human slain.

2

Friends and foes,—who could discover which,

As they marked the zigzag, outer ditch,

Or lay so cold and still in the bush,

Fallen and trampled down in the last wild rush?

Then the shattered forest-trees; the clearing there

Where a battery stood; dead horses, pawing the air

With horrible upright hoofs; a mangled mass

Of wounded and stifled men in the low morass;

And the long trench dug in haste for a burial-pit,

Whose yawning length and breadth all comers fit.

3

And over the dreadful precinct, like the lights

That flit through graveyard walks in dismal nights,

Men with lanterns were groping among the dead,

Holding the flame to every hueless face,

And bearing those whose life had not wholly fled

On stretchers, that looked like biers, from the ghastly place.

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