A plea for the extension of the benefits of the Geneva Convention to those relieving wounded horses on the battlefield.

Here long unhelped and helpless have I lain,
    In agony that quite forbids me swoon;
Thro’ the cold night’s intolerable pain,
    Thro’ thirst and torture of the burning noon.

Shot in the spine, I cannot move nor rise,
    Dumb, shattered jaws are filled with blood and sand,
And fettered by a girth that none unties,
    My poor swoll’n body feels the tightening band.

I have no God to pray to,—He, the man
    Who was to me as God, reeled back stone dead,
I fell when charging foremost in the van,
    My comrades past me like a whirlwind fled.

At early dawn a cock-crow from afar,   
    With momentary solace seemed to come;
For I remembered fields unplagued by war—
    Those pleasant pastures of my native home.

The cock-crow ceased, but voice to voice replied
    (Voices of unimaginable woe),
And here a brother raised his neck and cried,
    There pawed the pitiless earth in dying throe;

“I could not die.”  Ah, friends with tender heart,
    Think of the horse, that wounded and in fear,
Lies still undying in his long death smart,
    And only asks a ball behind the ear.

Shall not the Christ, Who came with Saviour hands
    To bid the travail of creation cease;
Send forth to fields of war His Red-Cross bands,
    And give the dying charger painless peace? 

(Ballads of the War, p. 184)