Come, young lady reader, let us, in imagination, stand together on the firing-line: Those regiments lining up are from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. They are forming for a charge. It is the only way. Those shells, bursting among them with such deadly effect, are shrapnel from the quick-firing guns of the enemy placed just over the crest of yonder distant ridge; and those huge plunging projectiles, which throw up great inverted cones of earth, with fragments of men, are from the enemy's big howitzers, located under cover of the wood that fringes the horizon.
If we only had the necessary quick-firing field-guns and shrapnel ammunition, and the necessary field howitzers, we might dislodge or silence those deadly batteries of the enemy. At any rate, we should be able to engage them efficiently and cover the charge of our troops. We should also be able to storm that line of trenches, to the discomfiture of the enemy hidden there in vast numbers, and thus to prepare for the onset of our men. But we have neither the guns nor the ammunition.
See--the order is given. Onward they go. Watch them, the brave fellows! Why does the front line lie down so suddenly, with a few left standing? My friend, they are not lying down; they are dead. But they are not all killed, a large number of them are wounded. They are torn in every inconceivable, horrible manner of mutilation. And look!--the other lines go down, too; some lying still, others writhing on the ground. One of those poor devils, with hands clenched in the grass and gnawing the earth, is your brother!
See--a huge howitzer shell explodes right among them. The young man whom you were to marry on his return from the war was standing on the verge of the crater when the explosion came, and he is now lying there, with both eyes blown out by the awful blast and hanging on his cheeks. There are visions of you in the blasted eyes, and there are thoughts of you in the dazed brain, and his dying breath is a whisper of your name.
Will you continue to think thoughts and speak words which may drive him to that awful death?
The picture is horrible. That of the blasted eyes is revolting. True, and for this reason it may not come within the artistic, as outlined in the philosophy of Longinus; but it is not my purpose here to be artistic. My very purpose is to visualize the horrible, because the only way for the people of this country to prevent this on-coming horror is to make the necessary military preparations for national defense.