Chickamauga (17 page)

They say the bluecoats, marching through the ripe wheat,

Made a blue-and-yellow picture that men remember

Even now in their age, in their crack-voiced age.

They say the noise was incessant as the sound

Of all wolves howling, when that attack came on.

They say, when the guns all spoke, that the solid ground

Of the rocky ridges trembled like a sick child.

We have made the sick earth tremble with other shakings

In our time, in our time, in our time, but it has not taught
us

To leave the grain in the field.
So the storm came on

Yelling against the angle. The men who fought there

Were the tired fighters, the hammered, the weather- beaten,

The very hard-dying men. They came and died

And came again and died and stood there and died,

Till at last the angle was crumpled and broken in,

Sickles shot down, Willard, Barlow and Semmes shot down,

Wheatfield and orchard bloody and trampled and taken,

And Hood’s tall Texans sweeping on toward the Round Tops

As Hood fell wounded. On Little Round Top’s height

Stands a lonely figure, seeing that rush come on—

Greek-mouthed Warren, Meade’s chief of engineers.

—Sometimes, and in battle even, a moment comes

When a man with eyes can see a dip in the scales

And, so seeing, reverse a fortune. Warren has eyes

And such a moment comes to him now. He turns

—In a clear flash seeing the crests of the Round Tops taken,

The grey artillery there and the battle lost—

And rides off hell-for-leather to gather troops

And bring them up in the very nick of time,

While the grey rush still advances, keening its cry.

The crest is three times taken and then retaken

In fierce wolf-flurries of combat, in gasping Iliads

Too rapid to note or remember, too obscure to freeze in a song.

But at last, when the round sun drops, when the nun- footed night,

Dark-veiled walker, holding the first weak stars

Like children against her breast, spreads her pure cloths there,

The Union still holds the Round Tops and the two hard keys of war.

Night falls. The blood drips on the rocks of the Devil’s Den.

The murmur begins to rise from the thirsty ground

Where the twenty thousand dead and wounded lie.

Such was Longstreet’s war, and such was the Union defence,

The deaths and the woundings, the victory and defeat

At the end of the fish-hook shank. And so Longstreet failed

Ere Ewell and Early struck the fish-hook itself

At Culp’s Hill and the Ridge and at Cemetery Hill,

With better fortune, though not with fortune enough

To plant hard triumph deep on the sharp-edged rocks

And break the scales of the snake.…

Thus ended the second day of the locked bull-horns

And the wounding or slaying of the twenty thousand.

And thus night came to cover it. So the field

Was alive all night with whispers and words and sighs,

So the slow blood dripped in the rocks of the Devil’s Den.

Lincoln, back in his White House, asks for news.

The War Department has little. There are reports

Of heavy firing near Gettysburg—that is all.

Davis, in Richmond, knows as little as he.

In hollow Vicksburg, the shells come down and come down

And the end is but two days off. On the field itself

Meade calls a council and considers retreat.

His left has held and the Round Tops still are his.

But his right has been shaken, his centre pierced for a time,

The enemy holds part of his works on Culp’s Hill,

His losses have been most stark. He thinks of these things

And decides at last to fight it out where he stands.

Another clear dawn breaks over Gettysburg,

Promising heat and fair weather—and with the dawn

The guns are crashing again. It is the third day.

The morning wears with a stubborn fight at Culp’s Hill

That ends at last in Confederate repulse

And that barb-end of the fish-hook cleared of the grey.

Lee has tried his strokes on the right and left of the line.

The centre remains—that centre yesterday pierced

For a brief, wild moment in Wilcox’s attack,

But since then trenched, reinforced and alive with guns.

It is a chance. All war is a chance like that.

Lee considers the chance and the force he has left to spend

And states his will. Dutch Longstreet, the independent,

Demurs, as he has demurred since the fight began.

He had disapproved of this battle from the first

And that disapproval had added and is to add

Another weight in the balance against the grey.

It is not our task to try him for sense or folly,

Such men are the men they are—but an hour comes

Sometimes, to fix such men in most fateful parts,

As now with Longstreet who, if he had his orders

As they were given, neither obeyed them quite

Nor quite refused them, but acted as he thought best,

So did the half-thing, failed as he thought he would,

Felt justified and wrote all of his reasons down Later in controversy. We do not need

Such controversies to see that pugnacious man

Talking to Lee, a stubborn line in his brow

And that unseen fate between them. Lee hears him out

Unmoved, unchanging. “The enemy is there

And I am going to strike him,” says Lee, inflexibly.

At one o’clock the first signal-gun was fired

And the solid ground began to be sick anew.

For two hours then that sickness, the unhushed roar

Of two hundred and fifty cannon firing like one.

By Philadelphia, eighty-odd miles away,

An old man stooped and put his ear to the ground

And heard that roar, it is said, like the vague sea- clash

In a hollow conch-shell, there, in his flowerbeds.

He had planted trumpet-flowers for fifteen years

But now the flowers were blowing an iron noise

Through earth itself. He wiped his face on his sleeve

And tottered back to his house with fear in his eyes.

The caissons began to blow up in the Union batteries.…

The cannonade fell still. All along the fish-hook line,

The tired men stared at the smoke and waited for it to clear;

The men in the centre waited, their rifles gripped in their hands,

By the trees of the riding fate, and the low stone wall, and the guns.

These were Hancock’s men, the men of the Second Corps,

Eleven States were mixed there, where Minnesota stood

In battle-order with Maine, and Rhode Island beside New York,

The metals of all the North, cooled into an axe of war.

The strong sticks of the North, bound into a fasces- shape,

The hard winters of snow, the wind with the cutting edge,

And against them came that summer that does not die with the year,

Magnolia and honeysuckle and the blue Virginia flag.

Tall Pickett went up to Longstreet—his handsome face was drawn.

George Pickett, old friend of Lincoln’s in days gone by with the blast,

When he was a courteous youth and Lincoln the strange shawled man

Who would talk in a Springfield street with a boy who dreamt of a sword.

Dreamt of a martial sword, as swords are martial in dreams,

And the courtesy to use it, in the old bright way of the tales.

Those days are gone with the blast. He has his sword in his hand.

And he will use it today, and remember that using long.

He came to Longstreet for orders, but Longstreet would not speak.

He saw Old Peter’s mouth and the thought in Old Peter’s mind.

He knew the task that was set and the men that he had to lead

And a pride came into his face while Longstreet stood there dumb.

“I shall go forward, sir,” he said, and turned to his men.

The commands went down the line. The grey ranks started to move.

Slowly at first, then faster, in order, stepping like deer,

The Virginians, the fifteen thousand, the seventh wave of the tide.

There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,

And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,

And behind that force another, fresh men who had not yet fought.

They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.

From the hill they say it seemed more like a sea than a wave,

A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,

And yet, as it came, still closing, closing and rolling on,

As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left behind,

Spilled from that deadly march as a cart spills meal on a road,

And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more, And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

They halted but once to fire as they came. Then the smoke closed down

And you could not see them, and then, as it cleared again for a breath,

They were coming still but divided, gnawed at by blue attacks,

One flank half-severed and halted, but the centre still like a tide.

Cushing ran down the last of his guns to the battleline.

The rest had been smashed to scrap by Lee’s artillery fire.

He held his guts in his hand as the charge came up to the wall

And his guns spoke out for him once before he fell to the ground.

Armistead leapt the wall and laid his hand on the gun,

The last of the three brigadiers who ordered Pickett’s brigades,

He waved his hat on his sword and “Give ’em the steel!” he cried,

A few men followed him over. The rest were beaten or dead.

A few men followed him over. There had been fifteen thousand

When that sea began its march toward the fish-hook ridge and the wall.

So they came on in strength, light-footed, stepping like deer,

So they died or were taken. So the iron entered their flesh.

Lee, a mile away, in the shade of a little wood,

Stared, with his mouth shut down, and saw them go and be slain,

And then saw for a single moment, the blue Virginia flag

Planted beyond the wall, by that other flag that he knew.

The two flags planted together, one instant, like hos tile flowers.

Then the smoke wrapped both in a mantle—and when it had blown away,

Armistead lay in his blood, and the rest were dead or down,

And the valley grey with the fallen and the wreck of the broken wave.

Pickett gazed around him, the boy who had dreamt of a sword

And talked with a man named Lincoln. The sword was still in his hand.

He had gone out with fifteen thousand. He came back to his lines with five.

He fought well till the war was over, but a thing was cracked in his heart.

The night of the third day falls. The battle is done.

Lee entrenches that night upon Seminary Ridge.

All next day the battered armies still face each other

Like enchanted beasts. Lee thinks he may be attacked,

Hopes for it, perhaps, is not, and prepares his retreat.

Vicksburg has fallen, hollow Vicksburg has fallen,

The cavedwellers creep from their caves and blink at the sun.

The pan of the Southern balance goes down and down.

The cotton is withering.

Army of Northern Virginia, haggard and tattered,

Tramping back on the pikes, through the dust-white summer,

With your wounds still fresh, your burden of prison ers,

Your burden of sick and wounded,

“One long groan of human anguish six miles long.”

You reach the swollen Potomac at long last,

A foe behind, a risen river in front,

And fording that swollen river, in the dim starlight,

In the yellow and early dawn,

Still have heart enough for the tall, long-striding soldiers

To mock the short, half swept away by the stream.

“Better change your name to Lee’s Waders, boys!”

“Come on you shorty—get a ride on my back.”

“Aw, it’s just we ain’t had a bath in seven years

And General Lee, he knows we need a good bath.”

So you splash and slip through the water and come at last

Safe, to the Southern side, while Meade does not strike;

Safe to take other roads, safe to march upon roads you know

For two long years. And yet—each road that you take,

Each dusty road leads to Appomattox now.