With Sophy, the chambermaid. The woman talks
And he listens, while the woman looks through and through him,
Melora Vilas, rising by crack of dawn,
Looked at herself in the bottom of her tin basin
And wished that she had a mirror. She thought dully,
“He’s been gone two months. I can’t get used to it yet.
I’ve got to get used to it. Maybe I’ll die instead.
No, I’d know if he’d died.”
Sally Dupré was tired of scraping lint
But her hands kept on. The hours, sunbonneted women,
Passed and passed. “If he ever comes back to me!”
She finished her scraping and wondered how to make coffee
Out of willow-bark and life from a barren stick. …
Spade the fugitive stared at the bleak North Star. …
Luke Breckenridge, on picket out in the woods,
Remembered a chambermaid at Pollet’s Hotel.
And wanted a fight. He hadn’t been lucky, of late.
Jim, his cousin, was lucky, out in the West,
Riding a horse and capturing Yankee scouts.
But his winter here had been nothing but work and mud,
He’d nearly got courtmartialed a dozen times,
Thought they knew how he could shoot. The chambermaid’s name
Was Sophy. She was little and scared and thin,
But he liked her looks and he liked the size of her eyes,
He’d like to feed her up and see how she looked,
If they ever got through with fighting the Yankees here.
The Yankees weren’t all Kelceys. He knew that now,
But he always looked for Kelceys whenever he fought. …
Clay Wingate slept in his cloak and dreamed of a girl
With Sally’s face and Lucy Weatherby’s mouth
And waked again
To know today there would be continual guns.
Continual guns, silent so brief a moment,
Speak again, now,
For now your ignorance
Drowns out the little voices of human creatures.
Jackson slips from the Valley where he has played
A dazzling game against Banks and Shield and Frémont
And threatened the chess-game-king of Washington
Till strong pieces meant to join in McClellan’s game
Are held to defend that king. And now the two,
Jackson and Lee, strike hard for Seven Days
At the host come up from its ships, come up from the sea
To take the city set on a deck of land,
Till the deck is soaked and red with a bloody juice.
And the host goes back. You can read in the histories
How the issue wavered, the fog of tiny events,
How here, at one dot, McClellan might have wrung
A victory, perhaps, with his larger force,
And there, on the other hand, played canny and well;
How Jackson, for once, moved slowly, how Porter held,
And the bitter, exhausted wrestling of Malvern Hill.
What we know is this. The host from the ships went back,
Hurt but not broken, hammered but undestroyed,
To find a new base far up the crook of the James
And rest there, panting. Lincoln and Halleck come.
The gaunt, plain face is deeper furrowed than ever,
The eyes are strained with looking at books of tactics
And trying to understand. There is so much
For one man to understand, so many lies,
So much half-truth, so many counselling voices,
So much death to be sown and reaped and still no end.
The dead of the Seven Days. The four months dead
Boy who used to play with a doll named Jack,
Was a bright boy as boys are reckoned and now is dead.
The doll named Jack was sometimes a Union soldier,
Sometimes a spy. The boy and his brother held
A funeral in the White House flowerbeds
After suitably executing the doll named Jack
But then they thought of a different twist to the game.
The gaunt man signed a paper. “The doll named Jack
Is pardoned. By order of the President.
A. Lincoln.”
So Jack was held in honor awhile
But next day the boy and his brother forgot the pardon
And the doll named Jack was shot and buried once more.
So much death to be sown and reaped. So much death to be sown
By one no sower of deaths. And still no end.
The council is held. The chiefs and captains debate.
McClellan clings to his plan of storming the deck
From the water ways. He is cool now. He argues well.
He has written Lincoln “From the brink of eternity”
—A strained, high-flown, remarkable speech of a letter
Of the sort so many have written and still will write—
Telling how well he has done in saving his army,
No thanks to the Government, or to anything else
But the pith of his fighting-men and his own craft.
Lincoln reads and pockets the speech and thanks him.
There had been craft and courage in that retreat
And much was due to McClellan. The others speak.
Some corps commanders agree and some demur,
The Peninsula-stroke has failed and will fail again.
Elbow-rubbing Halleck, newly-made chief of staff,
Called “Old Brains,” for reasons that history
Still tries to fathom, demurs. He urges withdrawal.
Washington must be defended first and last—
Withdraw the army and put it in front of Washington.
Lincoln listens to all as he tries to sift
The mustardseed from the twenty barrels of chaff
With patient hands. There has been a growth in the man,
A tempering of will in these trotting months
Whose strong hoofs striking have scarred him again and again.
He still rules more by the rein than by whip or spur
But the reins are fast in his hands and the horses know it.
He no longer says “I think,” but “I have decided.”
And takes the strength and the burden of such decision
For good or bad on himself. He will bear all things
But lack of faith in the Union and that not once.
Now at last he decides to recall McClellan’s army
For right or wrong. We see the completed thing,
Long afterward, knowing all that was still to come,
And say “He was wrong.” He saw the incomplete,
The difficult chance that might turn a dozen ways
And so decided. Be it so. He was wrong.
So the deck is cleared and the host goes back to its ships.
The bells in the Richmond churches, clanging for Sunday,
Clang as if silver were mixed in their sweet bell-metal,
The dark cloud lifts, the girls wear flowers again.
Virginia June,
Crushed under cannon, under the cannon ruts,
The trampled grass lifts up its little green guidons,
The honeysuckle and the eglantine
Blow on their tiny trumpets,
Blow out “Dixie,”
Blow out “Lorena,” blow the “Bonnie Blue Flag”
—There are many dead, there are many too many dead,
The hospitals are crowded with broken
