NIGHT SCENES.

Evening Post, Volume LXIII, Issue 87, 12 April 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

NIGHT SCENES.

" Tho attack had failed, and the dead and wounded lay rotting and festering in littlo filthy clumps between here and the edge of the gorge a quarter of a mile below "And so the thunderstorm died away, as thunderstorms do in the evening, with little growls and rumbles in the distance, leaving everybody listening and talking in low Voices, oppressed by the receding booming, and by the silence which remains behind. A burst of firing here, single shots from unseen holes and hollows, which made heads which had not moved at the millions of shots echoing around thorn all day turn in that direction, so lonely were they in tho evening air ; the melancholy song of a belated shell, dreeing its weird up in the pale green sky, 'and its far-off thudding fall, thOfJall of a stono, the rustle of the river rapids below — what unforgettable musio all this to the thousunds swallowed up ■ in the div& billows of the land, lying and listening, trying not to hear the faint calls from the darkening hillside aboveNight fell terribly for tfiV poor wounded out there ; one had better not think of it ; yet even after two years, in this cheerful' sunny noonday, the whole hill is shrouded in a scented gloom, from whose depths tired, miserable voices call awfully and incessantly. ' Help J Help !• O-o-h ! Stretcher-beaver- r-r !' throughout the night, throughout the years, for ever, unless memory will become aa deaf as the ears through which such unutterable sadness wailed into her. "All night, and. all next day, and all tho night aft«r, they lay there; I have talked to anr*oflicer who lay with them — an ordinary, gallant English gentleman, who lay in holl for forty houra with thirteen wounds on his body, and fifty dying men around him. What he saw Wiertz himself would hesitate to put upon canvas; what ho said no British writer can tell to British people. Ho -used, to peep over his stono and watch them dying, expecting death every second himself. Prone forms, .which twisted rostleisly at tho first peep, would be immobile, thoir last contortion stuToned to dirty murblo, when he peeped 'again. It Bcemed terribly private, that stony slaughter-ground, dcscited by friends and unvisited by foes— a little unhappy world of its own, its inhabitants quietly dying and silently living behind the rocks.,, with no word for each other, for no ono knew whether the pair of legs or the top of the Iselmet he could see around the corner aid not belong to a corpse ; and in any case, when hope is dead, speech dies also, all but the rumble-dumble oi delirium, which occasionally murmured' from somo invftsib'.o corner when tho sun blazed out next day, stopping and recommendug like the sound of a distant thrashing-machine on a dreamy summer's <day in old Eugl^J. All of which would not bo worth tiling were it not true, terribly true, and but a tenth part of tho terriblo truth. Man's agony should be known, or at least guessed at, by a world whose eyes have been filling too long with unreal tears over every ' fop'pisi lamentation' piping from the circulating libraries and the committeerooms of cranks. Here was something' real, my masters. Ye are singularly i silent about it, considering how loudly minor woes can make you cackle— the quality of coooa supplied to your captured enemie^ for instance, or the lack of soap or sanitation for their families, who desire a wash but seldom, and drains nover.