That was his war—
Other voices, rising out of the scraps of paper,
Till they mix in a single voice that says over and over
“It is cold. It is wet. We marched till we couldn’t stand up.
It is muddy here. I wish you could see us here.
I wish everybody at home could see us here.
They would know what war is like. We are still patriotic.
We are going to fight. We hope this general’s good.
We hope he can make us win. We’ll do all we can.
But I wish we could show everybody who stays at home
What this is like.”
Voices of tired men,
Sick, convalescent, afraid of being sick.
“The diarrhea is bad. I hope I don’t get it
But everybody seems to get it sometime.
I felt sick last night. I thought I was going to die,
But Jim rubbed me and I feel better. There’s just one thing,
I hope I never get sent to the hospital,
You don’t get well when you go to the hospital.
I’d rather be shot and killed quick.”
(Nurses and doctors, savagely, tenderly working,
Trying to beat off death without enough knowledge,
Trying and failing.
Clara Barton, Old Mother Bickerdyke,
Overworked evangels of common sense,
Nursing, tending, clearing a ruthless path
Through the cant and red tape, through the petty jealousies
To the bitter front, bringing up the precious supplies
In spite of hell and high water and pompous fools,
To the deadly place where the surgeons’ hands grew stiff
Under the load of anguish they had to deal,
Where they bound men’s wounds and swabbed them with green corn leaves,
There being no other lint.
Whitman, with his sack of tobacco and comfits,
Passing along the terrible, crowded wards,
Listening, writing letters, trying to breathe
Strong life into lead-colored lips.
He does what he can. The doctors do what they can.
The nurses save a life here and another there,
But the sick men die like flies in the hospitals.)
Voices of boys and men,
Homesick, stubborn, talking of little things,
“We get better food. I’m getting to be a good cook.
The food’s bad. The whole company yelled ‘Hard Bread!’ today.
There are only three professed Christians in my whole regiment,
I feel sad about that
I wish you could see the way we have to live here,
I wish everybody at home could see what it’s like.
It’s muddy. It’s cold. My shoes gave out on the march.
We lost the battle. The general was drunk.
This is the roughest life that you ever saw.
If I ever get back home—”
And, over and over, in stiff, patriotic phrases,
“I am resigned to die for the Union, mother.
If we die in this battle, we will have died for the right,
We will have died bravely—you can trust us for that.
It is only right to die for our noble Union.
We will save it or die for it. There’s just one thing.
I hope I die quick. I hope I don’t have to die
In the hospital.
There is one thought that to me is worse than death.
(This, they say over and over) it is the thought
Of being buried as they bury us here
After a battle. Sometimes they barely cover us.
I feel sick when I think of getting buried like that,
Though if nothing except our death will rescue our Union,
You can trust us to die for it.”
And, through it all, the deep diapason swelling,
“It is cold. We are hungry. We marched all day in the mud.
We could barely stand when we got back into camp.
Don’t believe a thing the newspapers say about us.
It’s all damn lies. We are willing to die for our Union,
But I wish you could all of you see what this is like,
Nobody at home can imagine what it is like.
We are ready to fight. We know we can fight and win.
But why will they waste us in fights that cannot be won?
When will we get a man that can really lead us?”
These are the articulate that write the letters.
The inarticulate merely undergo.
There are times of good food and times of campfire jokes,
Times of good weather, times of partial success
In those two years. “The mail came. Thanks for the papers.
We had a good feed at Mrs. Wilson’s place.
I feel fine today. We put on a show last night.
You ought to have seen Jim Wheeler in ‘Box and Cox.’
Our little band of Christians meets often now
And the spirit moves in us strongly, praise be to God.
The President reviewed us two days ago.
You should have seen it, father, it was majestic.
I have never seen a more magnificent sight.
It makes me proud to be part of such an army.
We got the tobacco. The socks came. I’m feeling fine.”
All that—but still the deep diapason throbs
Under the rest. The cold. The mud. The bleak wonder.
The weakening sickness—the weevils tainting the bread—
We were beaten again in spite of all we could do.
We don’t know what went wrong but something went wrong.
When will we find a man who can really lead us?
When will we not be wasted without success?
Army of the Potomac, army of brave men,
Beaten again and again but never quite broken,
You are to have the victory in the end
But these bleak months are your anguish. Your voice dies out.
Let us hear the voice of your steadfast enemy.
Army of Northern Virginia, fabulous army,
Strange army of ragged individualists,
The hunters, the riders, the walkers, the savage pastorals,
The unmachined, the men come out of the ground,
Still for the most part, living close to the ground
As the roots of the cow-pea, the roots of the jessamine,
The lazy scorners, the rebels against the wheels,
The rebels against the steel combustion-chamber
Of the half-born new age of engines and metal hands.
The fighters who fought for themselves in the old clan-fashion.
Army of planters’ sons and rusty poor-whites,
Where one man came to war with a haircloth trunk
Full of fine shirts and a body-servant to mend them,
And another came with a rifle used at King’s Mountain
And nothing else but his pants and his sun-cracked hands,
Aristo-democracy armed with a forlorn hope,
Where a scholar turned the leaves of an Arabic grammar
By the campfire-glow, and a drawling mountaineer
Told dirty stories old as the bawdy world,
Where one of Lee’s sons worked a gun with the Rockbridge Battery
And two were cavalry generals. Praying army,
Full of revivals, as full of
