Napoleon BonaparteAbbott, John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot)
History
Napoleon Bonaparte
Abbott, John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot)
Emperors -- France -- Biography; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
The French now made the welkin ring with shouts of victory.
Indescribable dismay filled the Austrian ranks as wildly they
rushed before their unrelenting pursuers. Their rout was utter and
hopeless. When the sun went down over this field of blood, after
twelve hours of the most frightful carnage, a scene was presented
horrid enough to appall the heart of a demon. More than twenty thousand
human bodies were strewn upon the ground, the dying and the dead,
weltering in gore, and in every conceivable form of disfiguration.
Horses, with limbs torn their bodies, were struggling in convulsive
agonies. Fragments of guns and swords, and of military wagons
of every kind were strewed around in wild ruin. Frequent piercing
cries, which agony extorted from the lacerated victims of war,
rose above the general moanings of anguish, which, like wailings
of the storm, fell heavily upon the ear. The shades of night were
now descending upon this awful scene of misery. The multitude of
the wounded was so great, that notwithstanding the utmost exertions
of the surgeons, hour after hour of the long night lingered away,
while thousands of the wounded and the dying bit the dust in their
agony.
If war has its chivalry and its pageantry, it has also revolting
hideousness and demoniac woe. The young, the noble, the sanguine
were writhing there in agony. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear
out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek, and transform
the human face divine into an aspect upon which one can not gaze
but with horror. From the field of Marengo many a young man returned
to his home so multilated as no longer to be recognized by friends,
and passed a weary life in repulsive deformity. Mercy abandons the
arena of battle. The frantic war-horse with iron hoof tramples upon
the mangled face, the throbbing and inflamed wounds the splintered
bones, and heeds not the shriek of torture. Crushed into the bloody
mire by the ponderous wheels of heavy artillery, the victim of
barbaric war thinks of mother, and father, and sister, and home,
and shrieks, and moans, and dies; his body is stripped by the
vagabonds who follow the camp; his naked mangled corpse is covered
with a few shovels-full of earth, and left as food for vultures and
for dogs and he is forgotten forever--and it is called glory . He
who loves war, for the sake of its excitements, its pageantry, and
its fancied glory, is the most eminent of all the dupes of folly
and of sin. He who loathes war, with inexpressible loathing, who
will do everything in his power to avert the dire and horrible
calamity, but who will, nevertheless, in the last extremity, with
a determined spirit, encounter all its perils, from love of country
and of home, who is willing to sacrifice himself and all that is
dear to him in life, to promote the well being of his fellow-man,
will ever receive the homage of the world, and we also fully believe
that he will receive the approval of God. Washington abhorred war
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