The hospital Was cold, the rain poured, and the mud was frightful-- Poor Elenor was writing me--the food Was hardly fit to eat. To make it worse They put her on night duty for a month. Smallpox broke out and they were quarantined. A nurse she chose to be her friend was stricken With smallpox, died and left her all alone. One rainy morning she heard guns and knew A soldier had been stood against the wall. He was a boy from Texas, driven mad By horror and by drink, had killed a Frenchman. She had the case of crazy men at night, And one of them got loose and knocked her down, And would have killed her, had an orderly Not come in time. And she was cold at night, Sat bundled up so much she scarce could walk There in that ward on duty. Everywhere They thwarted her and crossed her, she was nagged, Brow-beaten, driven, hunted and besought For favors, for the word was well around She was the kind who could be captured--false, The girl was good whatever she had done. All this she suffered, and her lover now Had cast her off, it seems, had ceased to write, Had gone back to America--even then They did not wholly break her. But I ask What soldier or what nurse retained his faith, The splendor of his flame? I wish to God They'd pass a law and make it death to write Or speak of war as glory, or as good. What good can come of hatred, greed and murder? War licenses these passions, legalizes All infamies. They talk of cruelties-- We shot the German captives--and I nursed A boy who shot a German, with two others Rushed on the fallen fellow, ran him through, Through eyes and throat with bayonets. The world Is better, is it? And if Indians scalped Our women for the British, and if Sherman Cut through the south with sword and flame, to-day Such terrors should not be, we are improved! Yes, hate and lust have changed, and maniac rage, And rum has lost its potency to fire A nerve that sickens at the bloody work Where men are butchered as you shoot and slash An animal for food!