Explore "A Year's Casualties" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Slain as they lay by the secret, slow, / Pitiless hand of an unseen foe, / Two score thousand old soldiers have crossed / The river to join the loved and lost.
In the space of a year their spirits fled, / Silent and white, to the camp of the dead.
One after one, they fall asleep / And the pension agents awake to weep, / And orphaned statesmen are loud in their wail / As the souls flit by on the evening gale.
O Father of Battles, pray give us release / From the horrors of peace, the horrors of peace!