IV.—SUNSET UPON THE BATTLE FIELD.
It was sunset upon the field of battle—solemn and quiet sunset. The
rich, golden light fell over the grassy lawn, over the venerable fabric of
Chew's house, and over the trees scattered along the field, turning their
autumnal foliage to quivering gold.
The scene was full of the spirit of desolation, steeped in death, and crimsoned
in blood. The green lawn—with the soil turned up by the cannon
wheels, by the tramp of war steeds, by the rush of the foemen—was all
heaped with ghastly piles of dead, whose cold upturned faces shone with a
terrible lustre in the last beams of the declining sun.
There were senseless carcasses, with the arms rent from the shattered
body, with the eyes scooped from the hollow sockets, with foreheads severed
by the sword thrust, with hair dabbled in blood, with sunken jaws fallen on
the gory chest; there was all the horror, all the bloodshed, all the butchery
of war, without a single gleam of its romance or chivalry.
Here a plaid-kilted Highlander, a dark-coated Hanoverian, were huddled
together in the ghastliness of sudden death; each with that fearful red wound
denting the forehead, each with that same repulsive expression of convulsive
pain, while their unclosed eyes, cold, dead, and lustreless, glared on the blue
heavens with the glassy look of death.
Yonder, at the foot of a giant elm, an old Continental, sunk down in the
grasp of death. His head is sunken on his breast, his white hair all blood-bedabbled,
his blue hunting shirt spotted with clotted drops of purple. The
sunburnt hand extended, grasps the unfailing rifle—the old warrior is merry
even in death, for his lip wears a cold and unmoving smile.
A little farther on a peasant boy bites the sod, with his sunburnt face
half buried in the blood-soddened earth, his rustic attire of linsey tinted by
the last beams of the declining sun; one arm convulsively gathered under
his head, the long brown hair all stiffened with blood, while the other grasps
the well-used fowling piece, with which he rushed to the field, fought bravely,
and died like a hero. The fowling piece is with him in death; the fowling
piece—companion of many a boyish ramble beside the Wissahikon, many
a hunting excursion on the wild and dreamy hills that frown around that
rivulet—is now beside him, but the hand that encloses its stock is colder
than the iron of its rusted tube.
Let us pass over the field, with a soft and solemn footstep, for our path
is yet stamped with the tread of death; the ghosts of the heroes are thronging
in the air.
Chew's house is silent and desolate. The shattered windows, the broken
hall door, the splintered roof, the battered chimneys, and the walls of the
house stained with blood: all are silent, yet terrible proofs of the havoc and
ruin of the fight.
Silence is within Chew's house. No death-shriek, no groan of agony,
no voice shrieking to the uplifted sword to spare and pity, breaks upon the
air. All is still and solemn, and the eye of human vision may not pierce
the gloom of the unknown, and behold the ghosts of the slain crowding before
the throne of God.
The sun is setting over Chew's lawn and house, the soldiers of the
British army have deserted the place, and as the last beams of day quiver
over the field, death—terrible and fearful death—broods over the scene, in
all its ghastiliness and horror.
