Page:Poems - Southey (1799) volume 1.djvu/87

dead persons appeared to have expired in the act of embracing each other. Two young French Officers, who were brothers, had crawled under the side of a dead horse, where they had contrived a kind of shelter by means of a cloak; they were both mortally wounded, and groaning for each other. One very fine young man had just strength enough to drag himself out of a hollow partly filled with water, and was laid upon a little hillock groaning with agony; a grape-shot had cut across the upper part of his belly, and he was keeping in his bowels with a handkerchief and hat. He begged of me for God's sake to end his misery! he complained of dreadful thirst. I filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank off at once, and left him to that end of his wretchedness which could not be far distant."
I hope I have always felt and expressed an honest and christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of this authentic picture.