A LONG the roadways of the selfsame woods
Where Stonewall Jackson made his great flank charge, —
There near the Wilderness Tavern suddenly
The foemen clashed. The fight was terrible.
Through two days fought they in the labyrinth,
Forward and backward, round and round with death,
Wrapped in smoke shrouds, midst onslaught and retreat,
Within the dense waste writhing, seeing scant,
But firing where they caught a foeman's flash,
Until the incessant roll of musketry
Was muted by the cries of anguishment;
While stealthy, lengthening processions passed
Of wounded warriors hastened to the rear;
And all the hazels and the scrub-oaks flushed,
And the dark jungle-glooms turned savagely
Into the lurid glare of holocausts,
Midst tanglements conjoined, incarnadine,
With every thicket crimson, woods and roads
Strewn with the wrecks of carnage, forest mold
Blackened by running scorchings of the storm —
A Saturnalia of fratricide
Upon the strangest battlefield of time.
'Twas first and last of hate's red nondescripts;
Not warrior strategy, but Hell's invention.