Our summer skies were clouded dark and low;
'Twas not the blessed rain that bowed them down,
But smoke wreaths rolling heavy, huge, and slow,
And thick as rising from a conquered town.
And where rich crops, and wealthy orchards fair,
Spread to the sun, rustled in breeze of morn,
The fire passed through, and left them black and bare,
Rushing like Samson's foxes through the corn.
Then, like a giant roused, it onward came,
With red arm reaching to the trees on high;
Till the whole landscape in one sheet of flame,
Glowed like a furnace 'neath a brazen sky.
O'er many a hearth red, burning ruin swept,
Till people fancied 'twas a flaming world;
All labour gained, and prudent care had kept,
And precious life were in one ruin hurled.
But as the fire fast spread, 'tis sweet to know,
So loving kindness and sweet pity ran;
This wide spread wail of human want and woe,
Served to bring out the brotherhood of man.
Here, on the lovely pine-fringed Allumette,
We hear the distant echoes of the jar,
Where Galile pluck and Teuton drill have met
In the long shock of cruel murderous war.
We only read of fields heaped high with slain,
Of vineyards flooded red, but not with wine,
Of writhing heaps of groaning anguished pain,
Of wounded carted off in endless line.
We read of all the stern eyed pomp of war,
The list of wounded and the number slain,
But know not what war's desolations are,
How much one battle costs of human pain.
All the sweet homes beneath the chestnut trees
Blackened and waste, the hearth light quenched in gore;
What hecatombs of human agonies
Are laid war's demon-chariot wheels before
When a few deaths so shadow a whole place,
Let us but think of that beleaguered town
Where famine's blackness sits in every face,
War cutting thousands, want ten thousands down.