Book
II
A smoke-stained Stars-and-Stripes droops from a broken toothpick and ninety tired men march out of fallen Sumter to their ships, drums rattling and colors flying.
Their faces are worn and angry, their bellies empty and cold, but the stubborn salute of a gun, fifty times repeated, keeps their backs straight as they march out, and answers something stubborn and mute in their flesh.
Beauregard, beau sabreur, hussar-sword with the gilded hilt, the gilded metal of the guard twisted into lovelocks and roses, vain as Murat, dashing as Murat, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard is a pose of conquering courtesy under a palmetto-banner. The lugubrious little march goes grimly by his courtesy, he watches it unsmiling, a light half-real, half that of invisible footlights on his French, dark, handsome face.
The stone falls in the pool, the ripples spread.
The colt in the Long Meadow kicked up his heels.
“That was a fly,” he thought, “It’s early for flies.”
But being alive, in April, was too fine
For flies or anything else to bother a colt.
He kicked up his heels again, this time in pure joy,
And started to run a race with the wind and his shadow.
After the stable stuffiness, the sun.
After the straw-littered boards, the squelch of the turf.
His little hoofs felt lighter than dancing-shoes,
He scared himself with a blue-jay, his heart was a leaf.
He was pure joy in action, he was the unvexed
Delight of all moving lightness and swift-footed pace,
The pride of the flesh, the young Spring neighing and rearing.
Sally Dupré called to him from the fence.
He came like a charge in a spatter of clean-cut clods,
Ears back, eyes wide and wild with folly and youth.
He drew up snorting.
She laughed and brushed at her skirt
Where the mud had splashed it.
“There, Star—there, silly boy!
Why won’t you ever learn sense?”
But her eyes were hot,
Her hands were shaking as she offered the sugar
—Long-fingered, appleblossom-shadow hands—
Star blew at the sugar once, then mumbled it up.
She patted the pink nose. “There, silly Star!
That’s for Fort Sumter, Star!” How hot her eyes were!
“Star, do you know you’re a Confederate horse?
Do you know I’m going to call you Beauregard?”
Star whinnied, and asked for more sugar. She put her hand
On his neck for a moment that matched the new green leaves
And sticky buds of April.
You would have said
They were grace in quietness, seen so, woman and horse. …
The widened ripple breaks against a stone
The heavy noon walks over Chancellorsville
On brazen shoes, but where the squadron rode
Into the ambush, the blue flies are coming
To blow on the dead meat.
Carter, the telegraph-operator, sighed
And propped his eyes awake again.
He was tired.
Dog-tired, stone-tired, body and mind burnt up
With too much poker last night and too little sleep.
He hated the Sunday trick. It was Riley’s turn
To take it, but Riley’s wife was having a child.
He cursed the child and the wife and Sunday and Riley.
Nothing ever happened at Stroudsburg Siding
And yet he had to be here and keep awake
With the flat, stale taste of too little sleep in his mouth
And wait for nothing to happen.
His bulky body
Lusted for sleep with every muscle and nerve.
He’d rather have sleep than a woman or whiskey or money.
He’d give up the next three women that might occur
For ten minutes’ sleep, he’d never play poker again,
He’d—battered face beginning to droop on his hands—
Sleep—women—whiskey—eyelids too heavy to lift—
“Yes, Ma, I said, ‘Now I lay me.’ ”—
The sounder chattered
And his head snapped back with a sharp, neck-breaking jerk.
By God, he’d nearly—chat—chitter-chatter-chat-chat—
For a moment he took it in without understanding
And then the vein in his forehead began to swell
And his eyes bulged wide awake.
“By Jesus!” he said,
And stared at the sounder as if it had turned to a snake.
“By Jesus!” he said, “By Jesus, they’ve done it!” he said.
The cruelty of cold trumpets wounds the air.
The ponderous princes draw their gauntlets on.
The captains fit their coal-black armor on.
Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew,
Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,
Able, well-hated, face alive with life,
Looked round the council-chamber with the slight
Perpetual smile he held before himself
Continually like a silk-ribbed fan.
Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind
Weighed Gentiles in an old balance.
There they were.
Toombs, the tall, laughing, restless Georgian,
As fine to look at as a yearling bull,
As hard to manage.
Stephens, sickly and pale,
Sweet-voiced, weak-bodied, ailingly austere,
The mind’s thin steel wearing the body out,
The racked intelligence, the crippled charm.
Mallory—Reagan—Walker—at the head
Davis.
The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan
Was a dark prince, clothed in an Eastern stuff,
Whose brown hands cupped about a crystal egg
That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes stared, searching.
“I am the Jew. What am I doing here?
The Jew is in my blood and in my hands,
The lonely, bitter and quicksilver drop,
The stain of myrrh that dyes no Gentile mind
With tinctures out of the East and the sad blare
Of the curled ramshorn on Atonement Day.
A river runs between these men and me,
A river of blood and time and liquid gold,
—Oh white rivers of Canaan, running the night!—
And we are colleagues. And we speak to each other
Across the roar of that river, but no more.
I hide myself behind a smiling fan.
They hide themselves behind a Gentile mask
And, if they fall, they will be lifted up,
Being the people, but if I once fall
I fall forever, like the rejected stone.
That is the Jew of it, my Gentile friends,
To see too far ahead and yet go on
And I can smile at it behind my fan
With a drowned mirth that you would find uncouth.
For here we are, the makeshift Cabinet
Of a new nation, gravely setting down
Rules, precedents and cautions, never once
Admitting aloud the cold, plain Franklin sense
That if we do not hang together now
We shall undoubtedly hang separately.
It is the Jew, to see too far ahead—
I wonder what they’re doing in the North,
And how their Cabinet shapes, and how they take
Their railsplitter, and if they waste their time
As we waste ours and Mr. Davis’s.
Jefferson Davis, pride of Mississippi,
First President of the Confederate States,
What are you thinking now?
Your eyes look tired.
Your face looks more and more like John Calhoun.
And that is just, because you are his son
In everything but blood, the austere child
Of his ideas, the flower of states-rights.
I will not gird against you, Jefferson Davis.
I sent you a challenge once, but that’s forgotten,
And though your blood runs differently from mine,
The Jew salutes you from behind his fan,
Because you are the South he fell in love with
When that young black-haired girl with the Gentile-eyes,
Proud, and a Catholic, and with honey-lips,
First dinted her French heels upon his heart. …
We have changed since, but the remembered Spring
Can change no more, even in the Autumn smokes.
We cannot help that havoc of the heart
But my changed mind remembers half the Spring
And shall till winter falls.
No, Jefferson Davis,
You are not she—you are not the warm night
On the bayou, or the New Orleans lamps,
The white-wine bubbles in the crystal cup,
The almond blossoms, sleepy with the sun:
But, nevertheless, you are the South in word,
Deed, thought and temper, the cut cameo
Brittle but durable, refined but fine,
The hands well-shaped, not subtle, but not weak,
The mind set in tradition but not unjust,
The generous slaveholder, the gentleman
Who neither forces his gentility
Nor lets it be held lightly—
and yet, and yet
I think you look too much like John Calhoun,
I think your temper is too brittly-poised,
I think your hands too scholar-sensitive,
And though they say you mingle in your voice
The trumpet and the harp, I think it lacks
That gift of warming men which coarser voices
Draw from the common dirt you tread upon
But do not take in your hands. I think you are
All things except success, all honesty
Except the ultimate honesty of the earth,
All talents but the genius of the sun.
And yet I would not have you otherwise,
Although I see too clearly what you are.
Except—except—oh honeydropping Spring,
Oh black-haired woman with the Gentile eyes!
Tell me, you Gentiles, when your Gentile wives
Pray in the church for you and for the South,
How do they pray?—not in that lulling voice
Where some drowned bell of France makes undertones
To the warm river washing the levee.
You do not have so good a prayer as mine.
You cannot have so good a prayer as mine.”
Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field—
Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down
The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,
And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay
As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine
Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze;
The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,
The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,
State-character but comparative failure at forty
In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,
Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,
Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,
And a self-confidence like an iron bar:
This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck,
Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches
Which make the monumental booming of Webster
Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum,
Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting
And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so
He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange
Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit
Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still
And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered
To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat
He’d worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers.
He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers
Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague
A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren’t well
And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue.
But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by.
Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets.
Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could stand.
Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase,
Both of them good men, couldn’t afford to lose them,
But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase
And both of ’em think they ought to be President
Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter
The other day, he practically told me so.
I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride
Would send them both to the dickens when he found out,
But I can’t do that as long as they do their work.
The Union’s too big a horse to keep changing the saddle
Each time it pinches you. As long as you’re sure
The saddle fits, you’re bound to put up with the pinches
And not keep fussing the horse.
When I was a boy
I remember figuring out when I went to town
That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack
It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins,
One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up.
Seward and Chase’ll do for my pair of pumpkins.
And as for me—if anyone else comes by
Who shows me that he can manage this job of mine
Better than I can—well, he can have the job.
It’s harder sweating than driving six cross mules,
But I haven’t run into that other fellow yet
And till or supposing I meet him, the job’s my job
And nobody else’s.
Seward and Chase don’t know that.
They’ll learn it, in time.
Wonder how Jefferson Davis
Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter.
He must be thinking pretty hard and fast,
For he’s an able man, no doubt of that.
We were born less than forty miles apart,
Less than a year apart—he got the start
Of me in age, and raising too, I guess,
In fact, from all you hear about the man,
If you set out to pick one of us two
For President, by birth and folks and schooling,
General raising, training up in office,
I guess you’d pick him, nine times out of ten
And yet, somehow, I’ve got to last him out.
These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment’s flash,
Then that mind turned to business.
It was the calling
Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.
Shake out the long line of verse like a lanyard of woven steel
And let us praise while we can what things no praise can deface,
The corn that hurried so fast to be ground in an iron wheel
The obdurate, bloody dream that slept before it grew base.
Not the silk flag and the shouts, the catchword patrioteers,
The screaming noise of the press, the preachers who howled for blood,
But a certain and stubborn pith in the hearts of the cannoneers
Who hardly knew their guns before they died in the mud.
They came like a run of salmon where the ice-fed Kennebec flings
Its death at the arrow-silver of the packed and mounting host,
They came like the young deer trooping to the ford by Eutaw Springs,
Their new horns fuzzy with velvet, their coats still rough with the frost.
North and South they assembled, one cry and the other cry,
And both are ghosts to us now, old drums hung up on a wall,
But they were the first hot wave of youth too-ready to die,
And they went to war with an air, as if they went to a ball.
Dress-uniform boys who rubbed their buttons brighter than gold,
And gave them to girls for flowers and raspberry-lemonade,
Unused to the sick fatigue, the route-march made in the cold,
The stink of the fever camps, the tarnish rotting the blade.
We in our time have seen that impulse going to war
And how that impulse is dealt with. We have seen the circle complete.
The ripe wheat wasted like trash between the fool and the whore.
We cannot praise again that anger of the ripe wheat.
This we have seen as well, distorted and half-forgotten
In what came before and after, where the blind went leading the blind,
The first swift rising of youth before the symbols were rotten,
The price too much to pay, the payment haughty in kind.
So with these men and then. They were much like the men you know,
Under the beards and the strangeness of clothes with a different fit.
They wrote mush-notes to their girls and wondered how it would go,
Half-scared, half-fierce at the thought, but none yet ready to quit.
Georgia, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Maine,
Piney-woods squirrel-hunter and clerk with the brand-new gun,
Thus they were marshalled and drilled, while Spring turned Summer again,
Until they could stumble toward death at gartersnake-crooked Bull Run.
Wingate sat in his room at night
Between the moon and the candlelight,
Reading his Byron with knitted brows,
While his mind drank in the peace of his house,
It was long past twelve, and the night was deep
With moonlight and silence and wind and sleep,
And the small, dim noises, thousand-fold,
That all old houses and forests hold.
The boards that creak for nothing at all,
The leaf that rustles, the bough that sighs,
The nibble of mice in the wainscot-wall,
And the slow clock ticking the time that dies
All distilled in a single sound
Like a giant breathing underground,
A sound more sleepy than sleep itself.
Wingate put his book on the shelf
And went to the window. It was good
To walk in the ghost through a silver wood
And set one’s mettle against the far
Bayonet-point of the fixed North Star.
He stood there a moment, wondering.
North Star, wasp with the silver sting
Blue-nosed star on the Yankee banners,
We are coming against you to teach you manners!
With crumbs of thunder and wreaths of myrtle
And cannon that dance to a Dixie chorus,
With a song that bites like a snapping-turtle
And the tiger-lily of Summer before us,
To pull you down like a torn bandana,
And drown you deeper than the Savannah!
And still, while his arrogance made its cry,
He shivered a little, wondering why.
There was his uniform, grey as ash,
The boots that shone like a well-rubbed table,
The tassels of silk on the colored sash
And sleek Black Whistle down in the stable,
The housewife, stitched from a beauty’s fan,
The pocket-Bible with Mother’s writing,
The sabre never yet fleshed in man,
And all the crisp new toys of fighting.
He gloated at them with a boyish pride,
But still he wondered, Monmouth-eyed.
The Black Horse Troop was a cavalier
And gallant name for a lady’s ear.
He liked the sound and the ringing brag
And the girls who stitched on the county flag,
The smell of horses and saddle-leather
And the feel of the squadron riding together,
From the loose-reined canter of colts at large,
To the crammed, tense second before the charge:
He liked it all with the young, keen zest
Of a hound unleashed and a hawk unjessed.
And yet—what happened to men in war
Why were they all going out to war?
He brooded a moment. It wasn’t slavery,
That stale red-herring of Yankee knavery
Nor even states-rights, at least not solely,
But something so dim that it must be holy.
A voice, a fragrance, a taste of wine,
A face half-seen in old candleshine,
A yellow river, a blowing dust,
Something beyond you that you must trust,
Something so shrouded it must be great,
The dead men building the living State
From ’simmon-seed on a sandy bottom,
The woman South in her rivers laving
That body whiter than new-blown cotton
And savage and sweet as wild-orange-blossom,
The dark hair streams on the barbarous bosom,
If there ever has been a land worth saving—
In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand,
And live and die for Dixie! …
And yet—and yet—in some cold Northern room,
Does anyone else stare out the obdurate moon
With doubtful passion, seeing his toys of fighting
Scribbled all over with such silver writing
From such a heart of peace, they seem the stale
Cast properties of a dead and childish tale?
And does he see, too soon,
Over the horse, over the horse and rider,
The grey, soft swathing shadowness of the spider,
Spinning his quiet loom?
No—no other man is cursed
With such doubleness of eye,
They can hunger, they can thirst,
But they know for what and why.
I can drink the midnight out,
And rise empty, having dined.
For my courage and my doubt
Are a double strand of mind,
And too subtly intertwined.
They are my flesh, they are my bone,
My shame and my foundation-stone.
I was born alone, to live alone.
Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,
Eyes that are neither black nor grey,
Why do you haunt me, night and day?
Sea-changing eyes, with the deep, drowned glimmer
Of bar-gold crumbling from sunken ships,
Where the sea-dwarfs creep through the streaked, green shimmer
To press the gold to their glass-cold lips.
They sculpture the gold for a precious ring,
In the caverns under the under-skies,
They would marry the son to a sailor-king!
You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes.
You have taken it, yes, but I do not know.
There are too many roads where I must go.
There are too many beds where I have slept
For a night unweeping, to quit unwept,
And it needs a king to marry the sea.
Why have you taken my heart from me?
I am not justice nor loyalty.
I am the shape of the weathercock,
That all winds come to and all winds mock.
You are the image of sea-carved stone,
The silent thing that can suffer alone,
The little women are easier,
The easy women make lighter love,
I will not take your face to the war,
I will not carry your cast-off glove.
Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré,
Heart and body like sea-blown spray,
I cannot forget you, night or day.
So Wingate pondered in Wingate Hall,
And hated and loved in a single breath,
As he tried to unriddle the doubtful scrawl
Of war and courage and love and death,
And then was suddenly nothing but sleep—
And tomorrow they marched—to a two-months chasing
Of Yankees running away like sheep
And peace in time for the Macon racing.
He got in his bed. Where the moonlight poured,
It lay like frost on a sleeping sword.
It was stuffy at night in the cabins, stuffy but warm.
And smells are a matter of habit. So, if the air
Was thick as black butter with the commingled smells
Of greens and fried fat and field-sweat and heavy sleep,
The walls were well-chinked, the low roof kept out the rain.
Not like the tumble-down cabins at Zachary’s place
Where the field-hands lived all year on hominy-grits
And a piece of spoiled pork at Christmas.
But Zachary
Was a mean man out of the Bottoms, no quality to him.
Wingate was quality. Wingate cared for its own.
A Wingate cabin was better than most such cabins,
You might have called it a sty, had they set you there;
A Middle Age serf might have envied the well-chinked walls.
While as for its tenants then, being folk unversed
In any law but the law of the Wingate name,
They were glad to have it, glad for Fire on the hearth,
A roof from the dark-veined wind.
Their bellies were warm
And full of food. They were heavy in love with each other.
They liked their cabin and lying next to each other,
Long nights of winter when the slow-burning pine-knots
Danced ghosts and witches over the low, near ceiling,
Short nights of summer, after the work of the fields,
When the hot body aches with the ripened sweetness
And the children and the new tunes are begotten together.
“What you so wakeful for, black boy?”
“Thinkin’, woman.”
“You got no call to be thinkin’, little black boy,
Thinkin’s a trouble, a h’ant lookin’ over de shoulder,
Set yo’ head on my breas’ and forget about thinkin’.”
“I got my head on yo’ breas’, and it’s sof’ dere, woman,
Sof’ and sweet as a mournin’ out of de Scriptures,
Sof’ as two Solomon doves. But I can’t help thinkin’.”
“Ain’t I good enough for you no more, black boy?
Don’ you love me no more dat you mus’ keep thinkin’?”
“You’s better’n good to me and I loves you, woman,
Till I feels like Meshuck down in de fiery furnace,
Till I feels like God’s own chile. But I keeps on thinkin’,
Wonderin’ what I’d feel like if I was free.”
“Hush, black boy, hush for de Lord’s sake!”
“But listen, woman—”
“Hush yo’self, black boy, lean yo’self on my breas’,
Talk like that and paterollers’ll git you,
Swinge you all to bits with a blacksnake whip,
Squinch-owl carry yo’ talk to de paterollers,
It ain’t safe to talk like that.”
“I got to, woman,
I got a feelin’ in my heart.”
“Den you set on dat feelin’!
Never heard you talk so in all my born days!
Ain’t we got a good cabin here?”
“Sho’, we got a good cabin.”
“Ain’t we got good vittles, ain’t old Mistis kind to us?”
“Sho’ we got good vittles, and ole Mistis she’s kind.
I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis.”
“Den what you talkin’,
You brash fool-nigger?”
“I just got a feelin’, woman.
Ole Marse Billy, he’s goin’ away tomorrow,
Marse Clay, he’s goin’ with him to fight de Yankees,
All of ’em goin’, yes suh.”
“And what if dey is?”
“Well, sposin’ de Yankees beats?”
“Ain’t you got no sense, nigger?
Like to see any ole Yankees lick ole Marse Billy
And young Marse Clay!”
“Hi, woman, ain’t dat de trufe!”
“Well, den—”
“But I sees ’em all, jus’ goin’ and goin’,
Goin’ to war like Joshua, goin’ like David,
And it makes me want to be free. Ain’t you never thought
At all about bein’ free?”
“Sho’, co’se I thought of it.
I always reckoned when ole Marse Billy died,
Old Mistis mebbe gwine to set some of us free,
Mebbe she will.”
“But we-uns gwine to be old den,
We won’t be young and have the use of our hands,
We won’t see our young ’uns growin’ up free around us,
We won’t have the strength to hoe our own co’n ourselves,
I want to be free, like me, while I got my strength.”
“You might be a lot worse off and not be free,
What’d you do if ole man Zachary owned us?”
“Kill him, I reckon.”
“Hush, black boy, for God’s sake hush!”
“I can’t help it, woman. Dey ain’t so many like him
But what dey is is too pizen-mean to live.
Can’t you hear dat feelin’ I got, woman? I ain’t scared
Of talk and de paterollers, and I ain’t mean.
I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis and ole Marse Billy,
I’se mighty fond of ’em all at de Big House,
I wouldn’t be nobody else’s nigger for nothin’.
But I hears ’em goin’ away, all goin’ away,
With horses and guns and things, all stompin’ and wavin’,
And I hears de chariot-wheels and de Jordan River,
Rollin’ and Rollin’ and Rollin’ thu’ my sleep,
And I wants to be free. I wants to see my chillun
Growin’ up free, and all bust out of Egypt!
I wants to be free like an eagle in de air,
Like an eagle in de air.”
Iron-filings scattered over a dusty
Map of crook-cornered States in yellow and blue.
Little, grouped male and female iron-filings,
Scattered over a patchwork-quilt whose patches
Are the red-earth stuff of Georgia, the pine-bough green of Vermont.
Here you are clustered as thick as a clump of bees
In swarming time. The clumps make cities and towns.
Here you are strewn at random, like single seeds
Lost out of the wind’s pocket.
But now, but now,
The thunderstone has fallen on your map
And all the iron-filings shiver and move
Under the grippings of that blinded force,
The cold pull of the ash-and-cinder star.
The map is vexed with the long battle-worms
Of filings, clustered and moving.
If it is
An enemy of the sun who has so stolen
Power from a burnt star to do this work,
Let the bleak essence of the utter cold
Beyond the last gleam of the most outpost light
Freeze in his veins forever.
But if it is
A fault in the very metal of the heart,
We and our children must acquit that fault
With the old bloody wastage, or give up
Playing the father to it.
O vexed and strange,
Salt-bitter, apple-sweet, strong-handed life!
Your million lovers cast themselves like sea
Against your mountainy breast, with a clashing noise
And a proud clamor—and like sea recoil,
Sucked down beneath the forefoot of the new
Advancing surf. They feed the battle-worms,
Not only War’s, but in the second’s pause
Between the assaulting and the broken wave,
The voices of the lovers can be heard,
The sea-gull cry.
Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian,
Hand like a ham and arms that could wrestle a bull,
A roast of a man, all solid meat and good fat,
A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man,
Roused out of his wife’s arms. The dawn outside
Was ruddy as his big cheeks. He yawned and stretched
Gigantically, hawking and clearing his throat.
His wife, hair tousled around her like tousled corn,
Stared at him with sleep-blind eyes.
“Jake, it ain’t come morning,
Already yet?”
He nodded and started to dress.
She burrowed deeper into the bed for a minute
And then threw off the covers.
They didn’t say much
Then, or at breakfast. Eating was something serious.
But he looked around the big kitchen once or twice
In a puzzled way, as if trying hard to remember it.
She too, when she was busy with the first batch
Of pancakes, burnt one or two, because she was staring
At the “salt” on the salt-box, for no particular reason.
The boy ate with them and didn’t say a word,
Being too sleepy.
Afterwards, when the team
Was hitched up and waiting, with the boy on the seat,
Holding the reins till Jake was ready to take them,
Jake didn’t take them at once.
The sun was up now,
The spilt-milk-mist of first morning lay on the farm,
Jake looked at it all with those same mildly-puzzled eyes,
The red barn, the fat rich fields just done with the winter,
Just beginning the work of another year.
The boy would have to do the rest of the planting.
He blew on his hands and stared at his wife dumbly.
He cleared his throat.
“Well, good-by, Minnie,” he said,
“Don’t you hire any feller for harvest without you write me,
And if any more of those lightning-rodders come around,
We don’t want no more dum lightning-rods.”
He tried
To think if there was anything else, but there wasn’t.
She suddenly threw her big, red arms around his neck,
He kissed her with clumsy force.
Then he got on the wagon
And clucked to the horses as she started to cry.
Up in the mountains where the hogs are thin
And razorbacked, wild Indians of hogs,
The laurel’s green in April—and if the nights
Are cold as the cold cloud of watersmoke
Above a mountain-spring, the midday sun
Has heat enough in it to make you sweat.
They are a curious and most native stock,
The lanky men, the lost, forgotten seeds
Spilled from the first great wave-march toward the West
And set to sprout by chance in the deep cracks
Of that hill-billy world of laurel-bells.
They keep the beechwood-fiddle and the salt
Old-fashioned ballad-English of our first
Rowdy, corn-liquor-drinking, ignorant youth;
Also the rifle and the frying-pan,
The old feud-temper and the old feud-way
Of thinking strangers better shot on sight
But treating strangers that one leaves unshot
With border-hospitality.
The girls
Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth
Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age.
And if you yearn to meet your pioneers,
You’ll find them there, the same men, inbred sons
Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same;
A pioneer-island in a world that has
No use for pioneers—the unsplit rock
Of Fundamentalism, calomel,
Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes
And a hard God.
They are our last frontier.
They shot the railway-train when it first came,
And when the Fords first came, they shot the Fords.
It could not save them. They are dying now
Of being educated, which is the same.
One need not weep romantic tears for them,
But when the last moonshiner buys his radio,
And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl
Is civilized with a mail-order dress,
Something will pass that was American
And all the movies will not bring it back.
They are misfit and strange in our new day,
In Sixty-One they were not quite so strange,
Before the Fords, before the day of the Fords …
Luke Breckinridge, his rifle on his shoulder,
Slipped through green forest alleys toward the town,
A gawky boy with smoldering eyes, whose feet
Whispered the crooked paths like moccasins.
He wasn’t looking for trouble, going down,
But he was on guard, as always. When he stopped
To scoop some water in the palm of his hand
From a sweet trickle between moss-grown rocks,
You might have thought him careless for a minute,
But when the snapped stick cracked six feet behind him
He was all sudden rifle and hard eyes.
The pause endured a long death-quiet instant,
Then he knew who it was.
“Hi, Jim,” he said,
Lowering his rifle. The green laurel-screen
Hardly had moved, but Jim was there beside him.
The cousins looked at each other. Their rifles seemed
To look as well, with much the same taut silentness.
“Goin’ to town, Luke?”
“Uh-huh, goin’ to town,
You goin’?”
“Looks as if I was goin’.”
“Looks
As if you was after squirrels.”
“I might be.
You goin’ after squirrels?” “I might be, too.”
“Not so many squirrels near town.”
“No, reckon there’s not.”
Jim hesitated. His gaunt hands caressed
The smooth guard of his rifle. His eyes were sharp.
“Might go along a piece together,” he said.
Luke didn’t move. Their eyes clashed for a moment,
Then Luke spoke, casually.
“I hear the Kelceys
Air goin’ to fight in this here war,” he said.
Jim nodded slowly, “Yuh, I heerd that too.”
He watched Luke’s trigger-hand.
“I might be goin’
Myself sometime,” he said reflectively
Sliding his own hand down. Luke saw the movement.
“We-uns don’t like the Kelceys much,” he said
With his eyes down to pinpoints.
Then Jim smiled.
“We-uns neither,” he said.
His hand slid back.
They went along together after that
But neither of them spoke for half-a-mile,
Then finally, Jim said, half-diffidently,
“You know who we air goin’ to fight outside?
I heard it was the British. Air that so?”
“Hell, no,” said Luke, with scorn. He puckered his brows.
“Dunno’s I rightly know just who they air.”
He admitted finally, “But ’tain’t the British.
It’s some trash-lot of furriners, that’s shore.
They call ’em Yankees near as I kin make it,
But they ain’t Injuns neither.”
“Well,” said Jim
Soothingly, “Reckon it don’t rightly matter
Long as the Kelceys take the other side.”
It was noon when the company marched to the railroad-station.
The town was ready for them. The streets were packed.
There were flags and streamers and pictures of Lincoln and Hamlin.
The bad little boys climbed up on the trees and yelled,
The good little boys had clean paper-collars on,
And swung big-eyed on white-painted wicket-gates,
Wanting to yell, and feeling like Fourth of July.
Somebody fastened a tin can full of firecrackers
To a yellow dog’s tail and sent him howling and racketing
The length of the street.
“There goes Jeff Davis!” said somebody.
And everybody laughed, and the little boys
Punched each other and squealed between fits of laughing
“There goes Jeff Davis—lookit ole yellow Jeff Davis!”
And then the laugh died and rose again in a strange
Half-shrill, half-strangled unexpected shout
As they heard the Hillsboro’ Silver Cornet Band
Swinging “John Brown’s Body” ahead of the soldiers.
I have heard that soul of crowd go out in the queer
Groan between laughter and tears that baffles the wise.
I have heard that whanging band.
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree.”
Double-roll on the snare-drums, double squeal of the fife,
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”
Clash of the cymbals zinging, throaty blare of cornets,
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”
“On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!”
“Yeah! There they come! Yeah! Yeah!”
And they came, the bearskin drum-major leading the band,
Twirling his silver-balled baton with turkey-cock pomp,
The cornet-blowers, the ranks. The drum-major was fine,
But the little boys thought the captain was even finer,
He looked just like a captain out of a book
With his sword and his shoulderstraps and his discipline-face.
He wasn’t just Henry Fairfield, he was a captain,
—Henry Fairfield worried about his sword,
Hoping to God that he wouldn’t drop his sword,
And wondering hotly whether his discipline-face
Really looked disciplined or only peevish—
“Yeah! There they come! There’s Jack! There’s Charlie! Yeah! Yeah!”
The color-guard with the stiff, new flapping flag,
And the ranks and the ranks and the ranks, the amateur
Blue, wavering ranks, in their ill-fitting tight coats,
Shoulders galled already by their new guns,
—They were three-months’ men, they had drilled in civilian clothes
Till a week ago—“There’s Charlie! There’s Hank, yeah, yeah!”
“On to Richmond, boys! Three cheers for Abe Lincoln!
Three cheers for the boys! Three groans for old Jeff Davis
And the dirty Rebs!”
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”
Jack Ellyat, marching, saw between blue shoulders
A blur of faces. They all were faces he knew,
Old Mrs. Cobb with her wart and her Paisley shawl,
Little George Freeman, the slim Tucker girls,
All of them cheering and shouting—and all of them strange
Suddenly, different, faces he’d never seen.
Faces somehow turned into one crowd-face.
His legs went marching along all right but they felt
Like somebody else’s legs, his mind was sucked dry.
It was real, they were going away, the town was cheering them.
Henry Fairfield was marching ahead with his sword.
Just as he’d thought about it a thousand times,
These months—but it wasn’t the way that he’d thought about it.
“On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!”
There were Mother and Father and Jane and the house.
Jane was waving a flag. He laughed and called to them.
But his voice was stiff in his throat, not like his real voice.
This, everything, it was too quick, too crowded, not Phaëton
Charging his snarling horses at a black sea,
But a numb, hurried minute with legs that marched
Mechanically, feeling nothing at all.
The white crowd-face—the sweat on the red seamed neck
Of the man ahead—“On to Richmond!”—blue shoulders bobbing—
Flags—cheering—somebody kissed him—Ellen Baker—
She was crying—wet mouth of tears—didn’t want her to kiss him—
Why did she want to—the station—halt—Mother and Jane.
The engineer were a flag in his coat-lapel.
The engine had “On to Richmond!” chalked all over it.
Nothing to say now—Mother looks tired to death—
I wish I weren’t going—no, I’m glad that I am—
The damn band’s playing “John Brown’s Body” again,
I wish they’d stop it!—I wish to God we could start—
There—close up, men!—oh my God, they’ve let Ned out!
I told them for God’s sake to lock him up in the cellar,
But they’ve let him out—maybe he got out by himself—
He’s got too much sense—“No, down, Ned! Down, good dog!
Down, I tell you!—”
“Goodbye, boys! Goodbye! We’ll hang Jeff Davis!”
The engine squealed, the packed train started to move.
Ned wanted to come, but they wouldn’t let him come.
They had to kick him away, he couldn’t see why.
In another column, footsore Curly Hatton
Groaned at the thought of marching any more.
His legs weren’t built for marching and they knew it,
Butterball-legs under a butterball-body.
The plump good-tempered face with its round eyes
Blue and astonished as a china-doll’s,
Stared at the road ahead and hated it
Because there was so much of it ahead
And all of it so dry.
He didn’t mind
The rest so much. He didn’t even mind
Being the one sure necessary joke
Of the whole regiment. He’d always been
A necessary joke—fat people were.
Fat babies always were supposed to laugh.
Fat little boys had fingers poked at them.
And, even with the road, and being fat,
You had a good time in this funny war,
Considering everything, and one thing most.
His mind slipped back two months. He saw himself
In the cool room at Weatherby’s Retreat
Where all the girls were sewing the new star
In the new flag for the first volunteers.
He hadn’t thought of fighting much before,
He was too easy-going. If Virginia
Wanted secession, that was her affair.
It seemed too bad to break the Union up
After some seventy years of housekeeping.
But he could understand the way you’d feel
If you were thin and angry at the Yanks.
He knew a lot of Yankees that he liked,
But then he liked most people, on the whole
Although most girls and women made him shy.
He loved the look of them and the way they walked,
He loved their voices and their little sweet mouths,
But something always seemed to hold him back,
When he was near them.
He was too fat, too friendly,
Too comfortable for dreams, too easy-shy.
The porcelain dolls stood on the mantelpiece,
Waiting such slim and arrant cavaliers
As porcelain dolls must have to make them proud,
They had no mercy for fat Cupidons,
Not even Lucy, all the years before,
And Lucy was the porcelain belle of the world!
And so when she said.
And he couldn’t believe
At first.
But she was silver and fire and steel
That day of the new stars and the new flag,
Fire and bright steel for the invading horde
And silver for the men who drove them off,
And so she sewed him in her flag and heart:
Though even now, he couldn’t believe she had
In spite of all the letters and the socks
And kissing him before he went away.
But it was so—the necessary joke
Made into a man at last, a man in love
And loved by the most porcelain belle of the world.
And he was ready to march to the world’s end
And fight ten million Yanks to keep it so.
“Oh God, after we’re married—the cool night
Over the garden—and Lucy sitting there
In her blue dress while the big stars come out.”
His face was funny with love and footsore pride,
The man beside him saw it, gave a laugh,
“Curly’s thinking it’s time for a julep, boys!
Hot work for fat men, Curly!”
The crows fly over the Henry House, through the red sky of evening, cawing,
Judith Henry, bedridden, watches them through the clouded glass of old sight.
(July is hot in Virginia—a parched, sun-leathered farmer sawing
Dry sticks with a cicada-saw that creaks all the lukewarm night.)
But Judith Henry’s hands are cool in spite of all midsummer’s burning,
Cool, muted and frail with age like the smoothness of old yellow linen, the cool touch of old, dulled rings.
Her years go past her in bed like falling waters and the waters of a millwheel turning,
And she is not ill content to lie there, dozing and calm, remembering youth, to the gushing of those watersprings.
She has known Time like the cock of red dawn and Time like a tired clock slowing;
She has seen so many faces and bodies, young and then old, so much life, so many patterns of death and birth.
She knows that she must leave them soon. She is not afraid to flow with that river’s flowing.
But the wrinkled earth still hangs at her sufficed breast like a weary child, she is unwilling to go while she still has milk for the earth.
She will go in her sleep, most likely, she has the sunk death-sleep of the old already,
(War-bugles by the Potomac, you cannot reach her ears with your brass lyric, piercing the crowded dark.)
It does not matter, the farm will go on, the farm and the children bury her in her best dress, the plow cut its furrow, steady,
(War-horses of the Shenandoah, why should you hurry so fast to tramp the last ashy fire from so feeble and retired a spark?)
There is nothing here but a creek and a house called the Henry House, a farm and a bedridden woman and people with country faces.
There is nothing for you here. And La Haye Sainte was a quiet farm and the mile by it a quiet mile.
And Lexington was a place to work in like any one of a dozen dull, little places.
And they raised good crops at Blenheim till the soldiers came and spoiled the crops for a while.
The red evening fades into twilight, the crows have gone to their trees, the slow, hot stars are emerging.
It is cooler now on the hill—and in the camps it is cooler, where the untried soldiers find their bivouac hard.
Where, from North and South, the blind wrestlers of armies converge on the forgotten house like the double pincers of an iron claw converging.
And Johnston hurries his tired brigades from the Valley, to bring them up in time before McDowell can fall on Beauregard.
The congressmen came out to see Bull Run,
The congressmen who like free shows and spectacles.
They brought their wives and carriages along,
They brought their speeches and their picnic-lunch,
Their black constituent-hats and their devotion:
Some even brought a little whiskey, too,
(A little whiskey is a comforting thing
For congressmen in the sun, in the heat of the sun.)
The bearded congressmen with orator’s mouths,
The fine, clean-shaved, Websterian congressmen,
Come out to see the gladiator’s show
Like Iliad gods, wrapped in the sacred cloud
Of Florida-water, wisdom and bay-rum,
Of free cigars, democracy and votes,
That lends such portliness to congressmen.
(The gates fly wide, the bronze troop marches out
Into the stripped and deadly circus-ring,
“Ave, Caesar!” the cry goes up, and shakes
The purple awning over Caesar’s seat)
“Ave, Caesar! Ave, O Congressmen,
We who are about to die,
Salute you, congressmen!
Eleven States,
New York, Rhode Island, Maine,
Connecticut, Michigan and the gathered West,
Salute you, congressmen!
The red-fezzed Fire-Zouaves, flamingo-bright,
Salute you, congressmen!
The raw boys still in their civilian clothes,
Salute you, congressmen!
The second Wisconsin in its homespun grey,
Salutes you, congressmen!
The Garibaldi Guards in cocksfeather hats,
Salute you, congressmen!
The Second Ohio with their Bedouin-caps,
Salutes you, congressmen!
Sherman’s brigade, grey-headed Heintzlemann,
Ricketts’ and Griffin’s doomed and valiant guns,
The tough, hard-bitten regulars of Sykes
Who covered the retreat with the Marines,
Burnside and Porter, Willcox and McDowell,
All the vast, unprepared, militia-mass
Of boys in red and yellow Zouave pants,
Who carried peach-preserves inside their kits
And dreamt of being generals overnight;
The straggling companies where every man
Was a sovereign and a voter—the slack regiments
Where every company marched a different step;
The clumsy and unwieldy-new brigades
Not yet distempered into battle-worms;
The whole, huge, innocent army, ready to fight
But only half-taught in the tricks of fighting,
Ready to die like picture-postcard boys
While fighting still had banners and a sword
And just as ready to run in blind mob-panic,
Salutes you with a vast and thunderous cry,
Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen,
Ave, O Iliad gods who forced the fight!
You bring your carriages and your picnic-lunch
To cheer us in our need.
You come with speeches,
Your togas smell of heroism and bay-rum.
You are the people and the voice of the people
And, when the fight is done, your carriages
Will bear you safely, through the streaming rout
Of broken troops, throwing their guns away.
You come to see the gladiator’s show,
But from a high place, as befits the wise:
You will not see the long windrows of men
Strewn like dead pears before the Henry House
Or the stone-wall of Jackson breathe its parched
Devouring breath upon the failing charge,
Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen,
Cigar-smoke wraps you in a godlike cloud,
And if you are not to depart from us
As easily and divinely as you came,
It hardly matters.
Fighting Joe Hooker once
Said with that tart, unbridled tongue of his
That made so many needless enemies,
“Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?”
The phrase
Stings with a needle sharpness, just or not,
But even he was never heard to say,
“Who ever saw a dead congressman?”
And yet, he was a man with a sharp tongue.
The day broke, hot and calm. In the little farm-houses
That are scattered here and there in that rolling country
Of oak and rail-fence, crooked creeks and second-growth pine,
The early-risers stand looking out of the door
At the long dawn-shadows for a minute or two
—Shadows are always cool—but the blue-glass sky
Is fusing with heat even now, heat that prickles the hairs
On the back of your hand.
They sigh and turn back to the house.
“Looks like a scorcher today, boys!”
They think already
Of the cool jug of vinegar-water down by the hedge.
Judith Henry wakened with the first light,
She had the short sleep of age, and the long patience.
She waited for breakfast in vague, half-drowsy wonderment
At various things. Yesterday some men had gone by
And stopped for a drink of water. She’d heard they were soldiers.
She couldn’t be sure. It had seemed to worry the folks
But it took more than soldiers and such to worry her now.
Young people always worried a lot too much.
No soldiers that had any sense would fight around here.
She’d had a good night. Today would be a good day.
A mile and a half away, before the Stone Bridge,
A Union gun opened fire.
Six miles away, McDowell had planned his battle
And planned it well, as far as such things can be planned—
A feint at one point, a flanking march at another
To circle Beauregard’s left and crumple it up.
There were Johnston’s eight thousand men to be reckoned with
But Patterson should be holding them, miles away,
And even if they slipped loose from Patterson’s fingers
The thing might still be done.
If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
—A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up—
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way—
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.
McDowell was neither a fool nor a fighting fool;
He knew his dice, he knew both armies unready,
But congressmen and nation wanted a battle
And he felt their hands on his shoulders, forcing his play.
He knew well enough when he played that he played for his head
As Beauregard and Johnston were playing for theirs,
So he played with the skill he had—and does not lie
Under a cupolaed gloom on Riverside Drive.
Put Grant in his place that day and with those same dice,
Grant might have done little better.
Wherefore, now,
Irvin McDowell, half-forgotten general,
Who tried the game and found no luck in the game
And never got the chance to try it again
But did not backbite the gamblers who found more luck in it
Then or later in double-edged reminiscences;
If any laurel can grow in the sad-colored fields
Between Bull Run and Cub Run and Cat Hairpin Bend
You should have a share of it for your hardworking ghost
Because you played as you could with your cold, forced dice
And neither wasted your men like the fighting fools
Nor posed as an injured Napoleon twenty years later.
Meanwhile, McDowell watched his long flanking column
File by, on the Warrentown pike, in the first dawn-freshness.
“Gentlemen, that’s a big force,” he said to his staff.
A full rifled battery begins to talk spitefully to Evans’ Carolinians. The grey skirmish-line, thrown forward on the other side of Bull Run, ducks its head involuntarily as a locomotive noise goes by in the air above it, and waits for a flicker of blue in the scrub-oaks ahead.
Beauregard, eager sabreur, whose heart was a French
Print of a sabretasche-War with “La Gloire” written under it,
Lovable, fiery, bizarre, picturesque as his name,
Galloped toward Mitchell’s Ford with bald, quiet Joe Johnston,
The little precise Scotch-dominie of a general,
Stubborn as flint, in advance not always so lucky,
In retreat more dangerous than a running wolf—
Slant shadow, sniffing the traps and the poisoned meat,
And going on to pause and slash at the first
Unwary dogs before the hunters came up.
Grant said of him once,
“I was always anxious with Joe Johnston in front of me,
I was never half so anxious in front of Lee.”
He kissed his friends in the Nelson-way we’ve forgotten,
He could make men cheer him after six-weeks retreating.
Another man said of him, after the war was done,
Still with that puzzled comparison we find
When Lee, the reticent sword, comes into the question,
“Yes, Lee was a great general, a good man;
But I never wanted to put my arms round his neck
As I used to want to with Johnston.”
The two sayings
Make a good epitaph for so Scotch a ghost,
Or would if they were all.
They are not quite all,
He had to write his reminiscences, too,
And tell what he would have done if it had not been
For Davis and chance and a dozen turns of the wheel.
That was the thistle in him—the other strain—
But he was older then.
I’d like to have seen him
That day as he galloped along beside Beauregard,
Sabreur and dominie planning the battle-lines.
They’d ordered Jackson up to the threatened left
But Beauregard was sure that the main assault
Would come on the right. He’d planned it so—a good plan—
But once the blocks start moving, they keep on moving.
The hands of the scuffed brown clock in the kitchen of the Henry House point to nine-forty-five.
Judith Henry does not hear the clock, she hears in the sky a vast dim roar like piles of heavy lumber crashingly falling.
They are carrying her in her bed to a ravine below the Sudley Road, maybe she will be safe there, maybe the battle will go by and leave her alive.
The crows have been scared from their nests by the strange crashing, they circle in the sky like a flight of blackened leaves, wheeling and calling.
Back at Centerville, there are three-months’-men,
A Pennsylvania regiment, a New York Battery.
They hear the spent wave of the roar of the opening guns,
But they are three-months’ men, their time is up today.
They would have fought yesterday or a week ago,
But then they were still enlisted—today they are not—
Their time is up, and there can’t be much use or sense
In fighting longer than you’ve promised to fight.
They pack up their things and decide they’d better go home,
And quietly march away from that gathering roar.
Luke Breckinridge, crouched by the Warrentown pike,
Saw stuffed dolls in blue coats and baggy trousers
Go down like squirrels under the rifle-cracks.
His eyes glowed as a bullet ripped his sleeve
And he felt well. Armies weren’t such a much
Too damn many orders, too damn much saluting,
Too many damn officers you weren’t allowed
To shoot when they talked mean to you because
They were your officers, which didn’t make sense.
But this was something he could understand,
Except for those dirty stinkers of big guns,
It wasn’t right to shoot you with big guns
But it was a good scrap except for that—
Carried a little high, then … change it … good …
Though men were hard to miss when you were used
To squirrels. His eyes were narrow. He hardly heard
The officer’s voice. The woods in front of him
Were full of Kelceys he was going to kill,
Blue-coated Kelcey dolls in baggy trousers.
It was a beautiful and sufficing sight.
The first blue wave of Burnside is beaten back from the pike to stumble a little way and rally against Porter’s fresh brigade.
Bee and Bartow move down from the Henry House plateau—grey and butternut lines trampling the bullet-cut oak-leaves, splashing across Young’s Branch.
Tall, black-bearded Bee rides by on his strong horse, his long black hair fluttering.
Imboden’s red-shirted gunners unlimber by the Henry House to answer the Parrotts and howitzers of Ricketts and Griffin. The air is a sheet of iron, continually and dully shaken.
Shippy, the little man with the sharp rat-eyes,
Saw someone run in front of them waving a sword;
Then they were going along toward a whining sound
That ran like cold spring-water along his spine.
God, he was in for it now! His sharp rat-eyes
Flickered around and about him hopelessly.
If a fellow could only drop out, if a fellow could only
Pretend he was hurt a little and then drop out
Behind a big, safe oak-tree—no use—no use—
He was in for it, now. He couldn’t get away.
“Come on, boys—come on, men—clean them out with the bayonet!”
He saw a rail-fence ahead, a quiet rail-fence,
But men were back of it—grey lumps—a million bees
Stinging the air—Oh Jesus, the corporal’s got it!—
He couldn’t shoot, even—he was too scared to shoot—
His legs took him on—he couldn’t stop his legs
Or the weak urine suddenly trickling down them.
Curly Hatton, toiling along the slow
Crest of the Henry Hill, over slippery ground,
Glanced at the still-blue sky that lay so deep
Above the little pines, so pooled, so calm.
He thought, with the slow drowsiness of fatigue,
Of Lucy feeding the white, greedy swans
On the blue pool by Weatherby’s Retreat.
They stretched their necks, and chattered with their wings.
There was a fragrance sleeping in her hair.
“Close up, folks—don’t straggle—we’re going into action!”
His butterball-legs moved faster—Lucy—Lucy—
Bee and Bartow’s brigades are broken in their turn—it is fight and run away—fight and run away, all day—the day will go to whichever of the untried wrestlers can bear the pain of the grips an instant longer than the other.
Beauregard and Johnston hurry toward the firing—McDowell has already gone—
The chessplayers have gone back to little pieces on the shaken board—little pieces that cannot see the board as a whole.
The block-plan is lost—there is no plan any more—only the bloodstained, fighting blocks, the bloodstained and blackened men.
Jack Ellyat heard the guns with a knock at his heart
When he first heard them. They were going to be in it, soon.
He wondered how it would feel. They would win, of course,
But how would it feel? He’d never killed anything much.
Ducks and rabbits, but ducks and rabbits weren’t men.
He’d never even seen a man killed, a man die,
Except Uncle Amos, and Uncle Amos was old.
He saw a red sop spreading across the close
Feathers of a duck’s breast—it had been all right,
But now it made him feel sick for a while, somehow.
Then they were down on the ground, and they were firing,
And that was all right—just fire as you fired at drill.”
Was anyone firing at them? He couldn’t tell.
There was a stone bridge. Were there rebels beyond the bridge?
The shot he was firing now might go and kill rebels
But it didn’t feel like it.
A man down the line
Fell and rolled flat, with a minor coughing sound
And then was quiet. Ellyat felt the cough
In the pit of his stomach a minute.
But, after that, it was just like a man falling down.
It was all so calm except for their guns and the distant
Shake in the air of cannon. No more men were hit,
And, after a while, they all got up and marched on.
If Rebels had been by the bridge, the rebels were gone,
And they were going on somewhere, you couldn’t say where,
Just marching along the way that they always did.
The only funny thing was, leaving the man
Who had made that cough, back there in the trampled grass
With the red stain sopping through the blue of his coat
Like the stain on a duck’s breast. He hardly knew the man
But it felt funny to leave him just lying there.
The wreckage of Bee, Bartow and Evans’ commands streams back into a shallow ravine below a little wood—broken blocks hammered into splinters by war—two thousand confused men reeling past their staggering flags and the hoarse curses and rallying cries of their officers, like sheep in a narrow run.
Bee tries to halt them furiously—he stands up in his stirrups, tree-tall, while the blue flood of the North trickles over the stream and pours on and on.
He waves his sword—the toyish glitter sparkles—he points to a grey dyke at the top of the ravine—a grey dyke of musket-holding Virginians, silent and ready.
“Look, men, there’s Jackson’s brigade! It stands there like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians!”
They rally behind them—Johnston and Beauregard are there—the Scotch dominie plucks a flag and carries it forward to rally the Fourth Alabama—the French hussar-sword rallies them with bursting rockets of oratory—his horse is shot under him, but he mounts again.
And the grey stone wall holds like a stiff dyke while the tired men get their breath behind it—and the odd, lemon-sucking, ex-professor of tactics who saw John Brown hung in his carpet-slippers and prayed a Presbyterian prayer for his damned soul, has a new name that will last as long as the face they cut for him on Stone Mountain, and has the same clang of rock against the chisel-blade.
Judith Henry, Judith Henry, they have moved you back at last, in doubt and confusion, to the little house where you know every knothole by heart.
It is not safe, but now there is no place safe, you are between the artillery and the artillery, and the incessant noise comes to your dim ears like the sea-roar within a shell where you are lying.
The walls of the house are riddled, the brown clock in the kitchen gouged by a bullet, a jar leaks red preserves on the cupboard shelf where the shell-splinter came and tore the cupboard apart.
The casual guns do not look for you, Judith Henry, they find you in passing merely and touch you only a little, but the touch is enough to give your helpless body five sudden wounds and leave you helplessly dying.
Wingate gentled Black Whistle’s pawing
With hand and wisdom and horseman’s play
And listened anew to the bulldogs gnawing
Their bone of iron, a mile away.
There was a wood that a bonfire crowned
With thick dark smoke without flame for neighbor,
And the dull, monotonous, heavy sound
Of a hill or a woman in too-long labor,
But that was all for the Black Horse Troop
And had been all since the day’s beginning,
That stray boy beating his metal hoop
And the tight-lipped wonder if they were winning.
Wainscott Bristol, behind his eyes,
Was getting in bed with a sweet-toothed wench,
Huger Shepley felt for his dice
And Stuart Cazenove swore in French
“Mille diables and Yankee blood!
How long are we going to stick in the mud?”
While a Cotter hummed with a mocking sigh,
“ ‘If you want a good time, jine the cavalry!’ ”
“Stuart’s in it, Wade Hampton’s in it.”
“The Yanks’ll quit in another minute!”
“General Beau’s just lost us!”
“Steady!”
“And he won’t find us until he’s ready!”
“It must be two—we’ve been here since six.”
“It’s Virginia up to her old-time tricks!
They never did trust a Georgia man,
But Georgia’ll fight while Virginia can!”
The restless talk was a simmering brew
That made the horses restless too;
They stamped and snuffled and pricked their ears—
There were cheers, off somewhere—but which side’s cheers?
Had the Yankees whipped? Were the Yankees breaking?
The whole troop grumbled and wondered, aching
For fighting or fleeing or fornicating
Or anything else except this bored waiting.
An aide rode up on a sweating mare
And they glowered at him with hostile stare.
He had been in it and they had not.
He had smelt the powder and heard the shot,
And they hated his soul and his martial noise
With the envious hate of little boys.
Then “Yaaih! Yaaih!”
—and Wingate felt
The whole troop lift like a lifted dart
And loosened the sabre at his belt,
And felt his chest too small for his heart.
Curly Hatton was nothing any more
But a dry throat and a pair of burnt black hands
That held a hot gun he was always firing
Though he no longer remembered why he fired.
They ran up a cluttered hill and took hacked ground
And held it for a while and fired for a while,
And then the blue men came and they ran away,
To go back, after a while, when the blue men ran.
There was a riddled house and a crow in a tree,
There was uneven ground. It was hard to run.
The gun was heavy and hot. There once had been
A person named Lucy and a flag and a star
And a cane chair beside wistarias
Where a nigger brought you a drink. These had ceased to exist.
There was only very hot sun and being thirsty.
Yells—crashings—screams from black lips—a dead, tattered crow
In a tattered tree. There had once been a person named Lucy
Who had had an importance. There was none of her now.
Up the hill again. Damn tired of running up hill.
And then he found he couldn’t run any more,
He had to fall down and be sick. Even that was hard,
Because somebody near kept making a squealing noise—
The dolefully nasty noise of a badly-hurt dog.
It got on his nerves and he tried to say something to it,
But it was he who made it, so he couldn’t stop it.
Jack Ellyat, going toward the battle again,
Saw the other side of the hill where Curly was lying,
Saw, for a little while, the two battered houses,
The stuffed dead stretched in numb, disorderly postures,
And heard for a while again that whining sound
That made you want to duck, and feel queer if you did.
To him it was noise and smoke and the powder-taste
And, once and again, through the smoke, for a moment seen,
Small, monstrous pictures, gone through the brain like light,
And yet forever bitten into the brain;
A marsh, a monstrous arras of live and dead
Still shaking under the thrust of the weaver’s hand,
The crowd of a deadly fair.
Then, orders again.
And they were going away from the smoke once more.
The books say “Keyes’ brigade made a late and weak
Demonstration in front of the Robinson house
And then withdrew to the left, by flank, down Young’s Branch,
Taking no further part in the day.”
To Jack Ellyat
It was a deadly fair in a burning field
Where strange crowds rushed to and fro and strange drunkards lay
Sprawled in a stupor deeper than wine or sleep,
A whining noise you shrank from and wanted to duck at,
And one dead cough left behind them in the tall grass
With the slow blood sopping its clothes like the blood on a shot duck’s breast.
Imboden is wounded, Jackson is shot through the hand, the guns of Ricketts and Griffin, on the Henry House plateau, are taken and retaken; the gunners shot down at their guns while they hold their fire, thinking the advancing Thirty-Third Virginia is one of their own regiments, in the dimness of the battle-cloud.
It is nearly three o’clock—the South gathers for a final charge—on the left, Elzey’s brigade, new-come from the Shenandoah, defiles through the oaks near the Sudley Road to reinforce the grey wrestler—the blue wrestler staggers and goes back, on unsteady heels.
The charge sweeps the plateau—Bartow is killed, black-haired Bee mortally wounded, but the charge goes on.
For a moment, the Union line is a solid crescent again—a crescent with porcupine-pricks of steel—and then a crescent of sand—and then spilt sand, streaming away.
There is no panic at first. There is merely a moment when men have borne enough and begin to go home. The panic comes later, when they start to jostle each other.
Jefferson Davis, riding from Manassas, reaches the back-wash of the battle. A calm grey-bearded stranger tells him calmly that the battle is lost and the South defeated. But he keeps on, his weak eyes stung with the dust, a picture, perhaps, of a Plutarch death on a shield in his schooled mind—and is in time to see the last blue troops disappear beyond Bull Run, and hear the last sour grumble of their guns.
Judith Henry, Judith Henry, your body has born its ghost at last, there are no more pictures of peace or terror left in the broken machine of the brain that was such a cunning picture-maker:
Terrified ghost, so rudely dishoused by such casual violence, be at rest; there are others dishoused in this falling night, the falling night is a sack of darkness, indifferent as Saturn to wars or generals, indifferent to shame or victory.
War is a while but peace is a while and soon enough the earth-colored hands of the earth-workers will scoop the last buried shells and the last clotted bullet-slag from the racked embittered acre,
And the rustling visitors drive out fair Sundays to look at the monument near the rebuilt house, buy picture postcards and wonder dimly what you were like when you lived and what you thought when you knew you were going to die.
Wingate felt a frog in his throat
As he patted Black Whistle’s reeking coat
And reined him in for a minute’s breath.
He was hot as the devil and tired to death,
And both were glad for the sun in the West
And a panting second of utter rest,
While Wingate’s mind went patching together
Like a cobbler piecing out scraps of leather
The broken glimmers of what they’d done
Since the sun in the West was a rising sun.
The long, bored hours of shiftless waiting
And that single instant of pure, fierce hating
When the charge came down like a cataract
On a long blue beach of broken sand
And Thought was nothing but all was Act
And the sabre seemed to master the hand.
Wainscott Bristol, a raging terrier
Killing the Yankee that shot Phil Ferrier
With a cut that spattered the bloody brains
Over his saddle and bridle-reins,
One Cotter cursing, the other praying,
And both of them slashing like scythes of slaying,
Stuart Cazenove singing “Lord Randall”
And Howard Brooke as white as a candle,
While Father fought like a fiend in satin,
And killed as he quoted tag-ends of Latin,
The prisoners with their sick, dazed wonder
And the mouths of children caught in a blunder
And over it all, the guns, the thunder,
The pace, the being willing to die,
The stinging color of victory.
He remembered it all like a harsh, tense dream.
It had a color. It had a gleam.
But he had outridden and lost the rest
And he was alone with the bloody West
And a trampled road, and a black hill-crest.
The road and the bushes all about
Were cluttered with relics of Yankee rout,
Haversacks spilling their shirts and socks,
A burst canteen and a cartridge-box.
Rifles and cups trampled underfoot,
A woman’s locket, a slashed black boot
Stained and oozing along the slash
And a ripe pear crushed to a yellow mash.
Who had carried the locket and munched the pear,
And why was a dead cat lying there,
Stark and grinning, a furry sack,
With a red flannel tongue and a broken back?
You didn’t fight wars with a tabby-cat. …
He found he was telling the Yankees that,
They couldn’t hear him of course, but still …
He shut his eyes for a minute until
He felt less dizzy. There, that was better,
And the evening wind was chilly and keen—
—He’d have to write Mother some sort of letter—
—He’d promised Amanda a Yank canteen,
But he didn’t feel like getting it here,
Where that dead cat snickered from ear to ear—
Back in the pinewoods, clear and far,
A bugle sang like a falling star.
He shivered, turned Black Whistle around
And galloped hastily toward the sound.
Curly Hatton opened his eyes again.
A minute ago he had been marching, marching,
Forever up and down enormous hills
While his throat scratched with thirst and something howled—
But then there was a clear minute—and he was lying
In a long, crowded, strangely-churchly gloom
Where lanterns bobbed like marshlights in a swamp
And there was a perpetual rustling noise
Of dry leaves stirred by a complaining wind.
No, they were only voices of wounded men.
“Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.”
He heard the rain on the roof and sucked his lips.
“Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.”
Oh, heavy sluices of dark, sweet, Summer rain,
Pour down on me and wash me free again,
Cleanse me of battles, make my flesh smell sweet,
I am so sick of thirst, so tired of pain,
So stale with wounds and the heat!
Somebody went by, a doctor with red sleeves;
He stared at the red sleeves and tried to speak
But when he spoke, he whispered. This was a church.
He could see a dim altar now and a shadow-pulpit.
He was wounded. They had put the wounded men in a church.
Lucy’s face came to him a minute and then dissolved,
A drowned face, ebbing away with a smile on its mouth.
He had meant to marry that face in another church.
But he was dying instead. It was strange to die.
All night from the hour of three, the dead man’s hour, the rain falls in heavy gusts, in black irresistible streams as if the whole sky were falling in one wet huddle.
All night, living and dead sleep under it, without moving, on the field; the surgeons work in the church; the wounded moan; the dissevered fragments of companies and regiments look for each other, trying to come together.
In the morning, when the burial-parties go out, the rain is still falling, damping the powder of the three rounds fired over the grave; before the grave is well-dug, the bottom of the grave is a puddle.
All day long the Southern armies bury their dead to the sodden drums of the rain; all day the bugle calls a hoarse-throated “Taps”; the bugler lets the water run from his bugle-mouth and wipes it clean again and curses the rainy weather.
All night the Union army fled in retreat
Like horses scared by a shadow—a stumbling flood
Of panicky men who had been brave for a while
And might be brave again on another day
But now were merely children chased by the night
And each man tainting his neighbor with the same
Blind fear.
When men or horses begin to run
Like that, they keep on running till they tire out
Unless a strong hand masters a bridle-rein.
Here there was no hand to master, no rein to clutch,
Where the riderless horses kicked their way through the crowd
And the congressmen’s carriages choked Cat Hairpin Bend.
Sykes and the regulars covered the retreat,
And a few was kept in some sort of order,
But the rest—They tried to stop them at Centerville.
McDowell and his tired staff held a haggard conference.
But before the officers could order retreat
The men were walking away.
They had fought and lost.
They were going to Washington, they were going back
To their tents and their cooking-fires and their letters from Susie.
They were going back home to Maine or Vermont or Ohio,
And they didn’t care who knew it, and that was that.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Johnston and Beauregard,
Now joined by the dusty Davis, found themselves
As dazed by their victory as their foes by defeat.
They had beaten one armed mob with another armed mob
And Washington was theirs for the simple act
Of stretching a hand to the apple up on the bough,
If they had known. But they could not know it then.
They too saw spectres—unbroken Union reserves
Moving to cut their supply-line near Manassas.
They called back the pursuit, such scattered pursuit as it was.
Their men were tired and disordered. The chance went by
While only the stiff-necked Jackson saw it clear
As a fighting-psalm or a phrase in Napoleon’s tactics.
He said to the surgeon who was binding his wound,
With a taciturn snap, “Give me ten thousand fresh troops
And I will be in Washington by tomorrow.”
But they could not give him the troops while there yet was time.
He had three days’ rations cooked for the Stonewall Brigade
And dourly awaited the order that never came.
He had always been at God’s orders, and God had used him
As an instrument in winning a certain fight.
Now, if God saw fit to give him the men and guns,
He would take Washington for the glory of God.
If He didn’t, it was God’s will and not to be questioned.
Meanwhile he could while the hours of waiting away
By seeing the Stonewall Brigade was properly fed,
Endeavoring, with that rigid kindness of his
To show Imboden his error in using profanity
—In the heat of battle many things might be excused,
But nothing excused profanity, even then—
And writing his Pastor at Lexington a letter
Enclosing that check for the colored Sunday-school
Which he’d promised, and, being busy, had failed to send.
There is not one word of Bull Run in all that letter
Except the mention of “a fatiguing day’s service.”
It would not have occurred to Jackson there might have been.
Walt Whitman, unofficial observer to the cosmos, reads of the defeat in a Brooklyn room. The scene rises before him, more real than the paper he stares upon. He sees the defeated army pouring along Pennsylvania Avenue in the drizzling rain, a few regiments in good order, marching in silence, with lowering faces—the rest a drenched, hungry mob that plods along on blistered feet and falls asleep on the stoops of houses, in vacant lots, in basement-areas huddled, too tired to remember battle or be ashamed of flight.
Nothing said—no cries or cheers from the windows, no jeers from the secessionists in the watching crowd—half the crowd is secessionist at heart, even now, more than ever now.
Two old women, white-haired, stand all day in the rain, giving coffee and soup and bread to the passing men. The tears stream down their faces as they cut the bread and pour out the coffee.
Whitman sees it all in his mind’s eye—the tears of the two women—the strange look on the men’s faces, awake or asleep—the dripping, smoke-colored rain. Perplexed and deep in his heart, something stirs and moves—he is each one of them in turn—the beaten men, the tired women, the boy who sleeps there quietly with his musket still clutched tightly to him. The long lines of a poem begin to lash themselves against his mind, with the lashing surge and long thunder of Montauk surf.
Horace Greeley has written Lincoln an hysterical letter—he has not slept for seven nights—in New York, “on every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.”
He was trumpeting “On to Richmond!” two weeks ago. But then the war was a thing for an editorial—a triumphal parade of Unionists over rebels. Now there has been a battle and a defeat. He pleads for an armistice—a national convention—anything on almost any terms to end this war.
Many think as he does; many fine words ring hollow as the skull of an orator, the skull of a maker of war. They have raised the Devil with slogans and editorials, but where is the charm that will lay him? Who will bind the Devil aroused?
Only Lincoln, awkwardly enduring, confused by a thousand counsels, is neither overwhelmed nor touched to folly by the madness that runs along the streets like a dog in August scared of itself, scaring everyone who crosses its path.
Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory. His huge, patient, laborious hands start kneading the stuff of the Union together again; he gathers up the scraps and puts them together; he sweeps the corners and the cracks and patches together the lost courage and the rags of belief.
The dough didn’t rise that time—maybe it will next time. God must have tried and discarded a lot of experiment-worlds before he got one even good enough to whirl for a minute—it is the same with a belief, with a cause.
It is wrong to talk of Lincoln and a star together—that old rubbed image is a scrap of tinsel, a scrap of dead poetry—it dries up and blows away when it touches a man. And yet Lincoln had a star, if you will have it so—and was haunted by a prairie-star.
Down in the South another man, most unlike him but as steadfast, is haunted by another star that has little to do with tinsel, and the man they call “Evacuation” Lee begins to grow taller and to cast a longer shadow.