 | Washington and his generals, or, Legends of the Revolution |  |
X.—THE POETRY OF BATTLE.
Talk not to me of the Poetry of Love, or the Sublimity of nature in repose,
or the divine beauty of Religion!
Here is poetry, sublimity, religion! Here are twenty thousand men
tearing each other's limbs to fragments, putting out eyes, crushing skulls,
rending hearts and trampling the faces of the dying, deeper down—
Poetry!
Here are horses running wild, their saddles riderless, their nostrils
streaming blood, here are wounded men gnashing their teeth as they endeavor
to crawl from beneath the horses' feet, here are a thousand little
pools of blood, filling the hollows which the hoofs have made, or coursing
down the ruts of the cannon wheels—Sublimity!
Here are twelve thousand British hirelings, seeking the throats of you
small band of freemen, and hewing them down in gory murder, because,
oh yes, because they will not pay tax to a good-humored Idiot, who even
now, sits in his royal halls of Windsor, three thousand miles away, with
his vacant eye and hanging lip, catching flies upon the wall, or picking
threads from his royal robe—yes, yes, there he sits, crouching among the
folds of gorgeous tapestry, this Master Assassin, while his trained murderers
advance upon the hills of Brandywine—there sits the King by right
divine, the Head of the Church, the British Pope!—Religion!
How do you like this Poetry, this Sublimity, this Religion of George
the Third?—
And now, when you have taken one long look at the Idiot-King, sitting
yonder in his royal halls of Windsor, look there through the clouds of battle,
and behold that warrior-form, mounted on a steed of iron-grey!
That warrior-form rising above the ranks of battle, clad in the uniform
of blue and buff and gold—that warrior-form, with the calm blue eye
kindling with such fire, with the broad chest heaving with such emotion—
with the stout arm lifting the sword on high, pointing the way to the field
of death—that form looming there in such grandeur, through the intervals
of battle-smoke—
Is it the form of some awful spirit, sent from on high to guide the course
of the fight? Is it the form of an earthly King?
Tell me the name of that warrior-form?
Have your answer in the battle-cry, which swells from a thousand hearts
—“Washington?”
| Washington and his generals, or, Legends of the Revolution | |