Leaving the War Behind

Leaving the War Behind for Elihu Burritt, peacemaker The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men! - H. W. Longfellow, “Christmas Bells” 1863, your old friend Longfellow almost despairing. What a year! The Union torn. Chancellorsville. War’s ravenous mouth. And then came Vicksburg, Gettysburg. The whole land lay in a bloody drouth, the cannon thundered in the South, and Elihu, you sailed away. For years you let the ink flow like a sea to float the cause of Peace. Yet you found no peace at home. Was it a personal surrender, to be England-bound? And with the sound of waves and seabirds, did you leave behind the burden of a homeland north to south a battleground? Could a foreign landscape comfort you? Or did war images confound – the carols drowned in military march-time in your head? As summer waned, the loss of Chickamauga. Brother killing brother in a marshy fen. Elihu, did you never quite give up the distant hope – oh where, and when? – of peace on earth, good-will to men?