Then came our stout camp-master,
"The night is coming down;
Already twilight darkness
Is casting shadows brown;
We would not lack for light on strife
If once we burned the town."
With that we fired the houses;
The ranks before us broke;
The fugitives we followed,
And dealt them many a stroke,
While round us rose the crackling flame,
And o'er us hung the smoke.
And what with flames around them,
And what with smoke o'erhead,
And what with cuts of sabre,
And what with horses' tread,
And what with lance and arquebus,
The town was filled with dead.
[Six thousand of the foemen]
Upon that day were slain,
Including those who fought us
Outside upon the plain—
Six thousand of the foemen fell,
[And eighty-two of Spain].
Not one of us unwounded
Came from the fearful fray;
And when the fight was over
And scattered round we lay,
Some sixteen hundred wounds we bore
As tokens of the day.
And through that weary darkness,
And all that dreary night,
We lay in bitter anguish,
But never mourned our plight,
Although we watched with eagerness
To see the morning light.
And when the early dawning
Had marked the sky with red,
We saw the Moloch incense
Rise slowly overhead
From smoking ruins and the heaps
Of charred and mangled dead.
I knew the slain were Pagans,
While we in Christ were free,
And yet it seemed that moment
A spirit said to me:
"Henceforth be doomed while life remains
This sight of fear to see."
And ever since that dawning
Which chased the night away,
I wake to see the corses
That thus before me lay:
And this is why in cloistered cell
I wait my latter day.
Thomas Dunn English.