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And night eternal darkens on his view.
Bear me to that accursed shore
dead persons appeared to have expired in the act of embracing each other. Two young French Officers, who were brothers, had crawled under the side of a dead horse, where they had contrived a kind of shelter by means of a cloak; they were both mortally wounded, and groaning for each other. One very fine young man had just strength enough to drag himself out of a hollow partly filled with water, and was laid upon a little hillock groaning with agony; a grape-shot had cut across the upper part of his belly, and he was keeping in his bowels with a handkerchief and hat. He begged of me for God's sake to end his misery! he complained of dreadful thirst. I filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank off at once, and left him to that end of his wretchedness which could not be far distant."
I hope I have always felt and expressed an honest and christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of this authentic picture.
