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
