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
