And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Brone through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw them...
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrad suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.
--Walt Whitman, in Sequel to Drum-Taps, 1865