Down a strange road, they are guided by an unknown force.
These misplaced souls are all journeying on the same course.
All of them have undergone intolerable strife.
To them, this trail started at the end of human life.
There are countless numbers of men wearing blue and gray.
They have been walking down this road during night and day.
During this Civil War, each one is a casualty.
They move, although none of them has any eyes to see.
They were killed at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga,
Antietam, Bull Run, Atlanta, and Spotsylvania.
The final one at the rear is a tall, bearded man.
He is following the others closely as he can.
This man possess some stark familiarity,
He is Abraham Lincoln, the last fatality.
Based on an episode of the TV show "The Twilight Zone"
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?
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