Battle Fog

Death peered through his spectacles
and with little hesitation
cut down the cornfield just north and to the east
of Sharpsburg. Blood flowed in the sunken lane
up to the knees of the few men left alive.
Burnside’s Bridge would have served
a better purpose disassembled
and planted in the ground as headstones
for the dead and the quick to join them.
He was determined to make it out of the lane.
A slaughterhouse was not a dignified place
to give up the ghost. He would much prefer
to crawl back to the lines and die among friends.
Sweat seeped out of his pores,
blood built up around his brain,
the battle fog pulsated with his heart.
No pain, no sensation, no rationality.
No idea that no enemies were chasing him.
She had to promise him three times he was safe.
He believed her and fixed his beautiful eyes
on her face and never turned away
until his breath gave way
the same way an infant’s would.





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An excerpt from The Longest Night by David J. Eicher.

"Hannah Ropes, a nurse in Washington tending to some of the Antietam wounded, noted how many of them slipped through a gripping delirium as they lay in pain. 'They young man who was shot through the lungs,' she penned to her mother in late September, 'to our surprise and, as the surgeons say, contrary to all 'science,' lived till last night, or rather this morning.... The pressure of blood from the unequal circulation had affected the brain slightly, and, as they all are, he was on the battlefield, struggling to get away from the enemy. I promised him that nobody should touch him, and that in a few minutes he would be free from all pain. He believed me and, fixing his beautiful eyes upon my face, he never turned them away; resistance, the resistance of a strong natural will, yielded; his breathing grew more gentel, ending softly as an infant's."