“We used to could drive all over this country where we pleased. The fences were laid down, and it was all trampled and cut up with the wagons, and soldiers, and artillery.” But the fences had been replaced, and now Lewy was obliged to keep the open road.
At a turn we came to a farm-house, near which were a number of dilapidated barns and other outbuildings, and some old straw stacks. “It was a sight to behold, passing yer after the battle!” said Lewy Smith, shaking his head sadly at the reminiscence. “All in and around these yer buildings, all around the hay-stacks, and under the fences, it was just nothing but groaning, wounded men!”
Crossing the yellow-flowing Antietam, we turned up the right bank, with its wooded shores on our right, and on our left a large cornfield containing not less than forty or fifty acres. “There was right smart o’ corn all through yer time of the battle. Good for the armies, but not for the farmers. Come to a cornfield like this, they just turned their horses and cattle right into it, and let ’em eat.” You fortunate farmers of the North and West, so proud and so careful of your well-tilled fields never yet broken into in this ruinous fashion, have you fully realized what war is?
Leaving the course of the creek, and crossing the fields where the fighting on our extreme right began, we reached a still and shady grove, beside which, fenced in from a field, was a little oblong burying-ground of something like half an acre. In the centre was a plain wooden monument constructed of boards painted white; the pedestal bearing this inscription:—
“Let no man desecrate this burial-place of our dead;”
And the side of the shaft, towards the fence, these words:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
This was the hospital cemetery. The graves were close together in little rows running across the narrow field. They were all overgrown with grass and weeds. Each was marked by a small rounded head-board, painted white, and bearing the name of the soldier sleeping below. Here is one out of the number:—
As I wrote down this name, the hens in the farm-yard near by were cackling jubilantly. The clouds broke also; a shaft of sunlight fell upon the glistening foliage of the grove, and slanted down through its beautiful vistas. I looked up from the sad rows of patriot graves, and saw the earth around me, all around and above the silent mouldering bodies of the slain, smiling sweetly through her misty veil. For Nature will not mourn. Nature, serene, majestic, full of faith, makes haste to cover the wounds in the Earth’s fair bosom, and to smile upon them. The graves in our hearts also, which we deemed forever desolate, she clothes with the tender verdure of reviving hope before we are aware, and gilds them with the sunshine of a new love and joy. Blessed be our provident mother for this sweet law, but for which the homes in the land, bereft by these countless deaths in hospitals and on bloody fields, would lie draped in endless mourning.