n the glare of a burning day
Whilst the church-bells clamoured a call to pray.

War and its brother raced hand in hand,
That brother called Death; and they seared the land
With their fiery breath and the murder brand.

And copses and dales were bleeding red,
Naught was sacred, the living or dead,
The old, old man, or the girl just wed.

Men stormed the homestead, blazed the corn,
Pillaged and sacked from night till morn,
And spitted the babe that was newly born.

Savage and brutal, like hell-hounds freed,
They swarmed the hill, debauched with greed--
Some slunk behind, their lust to feed.

At last, when the streams ran human blood,
Soaking the fields in a scarlet flood,
A woman prayed with her child for food.

All on their way those soldiers passed
With a foetid jest at her hapless fast,
And some men cut her down at last.

They cut her down! Oh, woe is me,
And they left her to rot in her misery,
Naked and scorned for the world to see.

They left her bare in the cold night air,
Save only the comb in her coal-black hair,
And they strangled the baby, helpless there.

They did not trouble to wind them round
In a sheet of earth in the dewy ground,
They looted them both for the spoil they found.

But the wind was kind. It wailed aloud
And churned the dust, till it rose a cloud
like a pearly mist, to form a shroud.

And the leaves swooned down to the wind's sweet call
And covered the mother and babe and all,
Till they lay at peace in a soft green pall.

The church still ponders, and wonders when
Those bodies will rise from her graveyard pen,
But she knows they are blessed, those poor dead men,

For they sleep within her Christian fold
Under her consecrated mould,
Where a verse was read, and a prayer was told.

But under the hill, in the leaves somewhere,
Lie a mother and child all stark and bare,
Save only a comb in the coal-black hair--
Yet God will remember they lie out there.

Whilst digging up a hitherto uncultivated bit of garden near the
Mendips, a gardener came across the mutilated skeletons of a woman and
baby. A comb still decorated the woman's coal-black hair. At the
inquest afterwards held upon the skeletons, it was suggested that the
woman and her baby were probably refugees from the battle of Sedgemoor.