A Woman of the War

Through the sombre arch of that gateway tower
Where my humblest townsman rides at last,
You may spy the bells of a nodding flower,
On a double mound that is thickly grassed.

And between the spring and the summer time,
Or ever the lilac’s bloom is shed,
When they come with banners and wreaths and rhyme,
To deck the tombs of the nation’s dead,

They find there a little flag in the grass,
And fling a handful of roses down,
And pause a moment before they pass
To the captain’s grave with the gilded crown.

But if perchance they seek to recall
What name, what deeds, these honors declare,
They cannot tell, they are silent all
As the noiseless harebell nodding there.

She was tall, with an almost manly grace,
And young, with strange wisdom for one so young,
And fair with more than a woman’s face;
With dark, deep eyes, and a mirthful tongue.

The poor and the fatherless knew her smile;
The friend in sorrow had seen her tears;
She had studied the ways of the rough world’s guile,
And read the romance of historic years.

What she might have been in these times of ours,
At once it is easy and hard to guess;
For always a riddle are half-used powers,
And always a power is lovingness.

But her fortunes fell upon evil days--
If days are evil when evil dies,--
And she was not one who could stand at gaze
Where the hopes of humanity fall and rise.

Nor could she dance to the viol’s tune,
When the drum was throbbing throughout the land,
Or dream in the light of the summer moon
When Treason was clenching his mailèd hand.

Through the long gray hospital’s corridor
She journeyed many a mournful league,
And her light foot fell on the oaken floor
As if it never could know fatigue.

She stood by the good old surgeon’s side,
And the sufferers smiled as they saw her stand;
She wrote, and the mothers marvelled and cried
At their darling soldiers’ feminine hand.

She was last in the ward when the lights burned low,
And sleep called a truce to his foeman Pain;
At the midnight cry she was first to go,
To bind up the bleeding wound again.

For sometimes the wreck of a man would rise,
Weird and gaunt in the watch-lamp’s gleam,
And tear away bandage and splints and ties,
Fighting the battle all o’er in his dream.

No wonder the youngest surgeon felt
A charm in the presence of that brave soul,
Through weary weeks, as she nightly knelt
With the letter from home or the doctor’s dole.

He heard her called, and he heard her blessed,
With many a patriot’s parting breath;
And ere his soul to itself confessed,
Love leaped to life in those vigils of death.

“Oh, fly to your home!” came a whisper dread,
“For now the pestilence walks by night.”
“The greater the need of me here,” she said,
And bared her arm for the lancet’s bite.

Was there death, green death, in the atmosphere?
Was the bright steel poisoned? Who can tell!
Her weeping friends gathered beside her bier,
And the clergyman told them all was well.

Well--alas that it should be so!
When a nation’s debt reaches reckoning-day--
Well for it to be able, but woe
To the generation that’s called to pay!

Down from the long gray hospital came
Every boy in blue who could walk the floor;
The sick and the wounded, the blind and the lame,
Formed two long files from her father’s door.

There was grief in many a manly breast,
While men’s tears fell as the coffin passed;
And thus she went to the world of rest,
Martial and maidenly up to the last.

And that youngest surgeon, was he to blame?--
He held the lancet--Heaven only knows.
No matter; his heart broke all the same,
And he laid him down, and never arose.

So Death received, in his greedy hand,
Two precious coins of the awful price
That purchased freedom for this dear land--
For master and bondman--yea, bought it twice.

Such fates too often such women are for!
God grant the Republic a large increase,
To match the heroes in time of war,
And mother the children in time of peace.