War as It Is

It is not in the profligate camp that war wears its worst aspect. We must look for that on that terrible theatre of human passion — often the most revolting on which the eye of God can rest — a battle-field. Could an angelic spirit alight upon our earth for the first time in the presence of a battle, with what wondering horror would it be affected! As far as the eye can reach through the sulphurous smoke, a mighty host are engaged in dreadful carnage, amid the rattle of musketry, the roar of artillery, and the shouts of the combatants. These men fight as if they had been enemies from the cradle. A whole army of men are driving their swords through other men whom they never saw before, and whom but for the orders of a king or a general, they might have met in peaceful friendship. Hour after hour, the bloody work goes forward; until the side that is weakest (though perhaps morally the strongest, in being in the right) is overwhelmed, and the victorious host rushes on, trampling the wounded and dying into the earth. Is it all over now? — No! Let us follow them with sickened hearts as they gather up the wounded victims from the earth, slippery with blood, and toss them into carts, to be borne away to the hospitals — jolting heavily as they go. Oh! for a home then, and the soothing attentions of kindred hands! But a hospital is no home. It is a vast lazar-house stowed with the dead and the dying, and foul with the effluvia of a hundred wounds! There is no sister’s hand there to bathe a feverish head, or no tender wife to wipe the death-damp from the brow. One, perhaps, in the agonies of a fever, crying for a moment’s rest — for quiet to his raging head. But his neighbor on one side is raving in a delirium — and the other is already drawing his death-groan. Amidst this awful scene of cries, and oaths, and imprecations, we may even hear the last piercing prayer of some unhappy soul who had forgotten his God in the frivolities of a camp, and now finds that in the last struggle his Grod has forgotten him! and while amid the turmoil he tries to raise his last piteous cry, the death-rattle fills his throat, and he goes to join the host of his fellow-spirits that are pouring up unbidden before God.

And this is war I This is what people soolly talk about as if it were a holyday pastime! This is what men array them-Belves in gold and plumage for, and go £ut to, with music playing and colors flying! This is what men go to church and rejoice over, and ofPer up thanksgivings to Him whom they call the “God of Battles!” Spirit of the benevoleut Jesus! is this the religion Thou didst come to teach?

As for myself, whenever I read a high-sounding bulletin of victory, filled with expressions of pompous congratulation, I never can fix my mind upon it. It wanders away to that house of suffering where the woimded victims are breathing out their lives in agony. It wanders to the cottage fireside where sits the lone widow, mourning like Rachel, and “will not be comforted” — where the lisping cMld asks when his father will come back? and is told through stilling sobs, what bis young heart is slow to understand, that some strange man met bis father on the battle-field and smote him to the earth! My mind wanders up to that gathering — so sudden, so awful, before the bar of God! and I ask myself, when — WHEN will this stupendous outrage upon religion and humanity be swept from the face of an indignant earth?