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
