The movie,"Saving Private Ryan," certainly emphasized the horrors of war. Below is a news item from the Franklin Planters' Banner. The item was published on July 1, 1847, and shows that we have been aware of such scenes of destruction long before this movie was filmed. Don't read this essay if you are not prepared for the worst of disturbing battlefield images. "The Horrors of War" "Repair, in thought, to a field of recent battle. Here are heaps of slain, weltering in their blood, their bodies mangled, their limbs shattered, and almost every vestige of the human form and countenance destroyed. Here are multitudes trodden under foot, and the war-horse has left the trace of his hoof in many a crushed mutilated frame. Here are severer (sic) sufferers; they live, but live without hope or consolation. Justice despatches (sic) the criminal with a single stroke; but the victims of war, falling by casual undirected blows, often expire in lingering agony, their deep groans moving no compassion, their limbs writhing on the earth with pain, their lips parched with a burning thirst, their wounds open to the chilling air, the memory of home rushing on their minds, but not a voice of friendship or comfort reaching their ears. Amidst this scene of horrors, you see the bird and beast of prey gorging themselves with the dead and dying, and human plunderers rifling the warm and almost palpitating remains of the slain. If you extend your eye beyond the immediate field of battle, and follow the track of the victorious and pursuing army, you see the roads strewed (sic) with the dead; you see scattered flocks, and harvests trampled under foot, the smoking ruins of cottages, and the miserable inhabitants flying in want and despair; and even yet, the horrors of a single battle are not exhausted. Some of the deepest evils which it inflicts are silent, retired enduring, to be read in the widow's countenance in the unprotected orphan, in the aged parent, in affection cherishing the memory of the slain and weeping that it could not minister to their last pangs.--Channing" While these scenes describe all wars, it seems, to me, to be prophetic of the Civil War, not much more than a decade away. Ken Dupuy