The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4,
October, 1864, by Various

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Title: The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864
Devoted To Literature And National Policy

Author: Various

Release Date: November 18, 2007 [EBook #23537]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. VI.--OCTOBER, 1864.--No. IV.

SOME USES OF A CIVIL WAR.

War is a great evil. We may confess that, at the start. The Peace
Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled
dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and
curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a
great battle, are things no rhetoric can ever make lovely.

The poet may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the
historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the
heroism of the day of slaughter; but, after all, and none know this
better than the men most familiar with it, a great battle is the most
hateful and hellish sight that the sun looks on in all his courses.

And the actual battle is only a part. The curse goes far beyond the
field of combat. The trampled dead and dying are but a tithe of the
actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes
sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household
fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep
for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a
thousand roofs--cottage roofs and palace roofs--little children ask for
'father.' The pattering feet shall never run to meet, upon the
threshold, _his_ feet, who lies stiffening in the bloody trench far
away!

There are added horrors in _civil war_. These forms, crushed and torn
out of all human semblance, are