But cotton has won again, cotton is haughty,
Cotton is mounting again to a sleepy throne,
Wheat and iron recoil from the fields of cotton,
The sweet grass grows over them, the cotton blows over them,
One more battle and free, free, free forever.
Cotton moves North in a wave, in a white-crested
Wave of puff-blossoms—in a long grey coil
Of marching men with tongues as dry as cotton.
Cotton and honeysuckle and eglantine
Move North in a drenching wave of blossom and guns
To wash out wheat and iron forever and ever.
There will be other waves that set toward the North,
There will be a high tide,
But this is the high hour.
Jackson has still three hammerstrokes to strike,
Lee is still master of the attacking sword,
Stuart still carries his black feather high.
Put silver in your bell-metal, Richmond bells,
The wave of the cotton goes North to your sweet ringing,
The first great raiding wave of the Southern dream.
Jack Ellyat, in prison deep in the South,
Gaunt, bearded, dirty old man with the captive eyes,
Lay on his back and stared at the flies on the wall
And tried to remember, through an indifferent mist,
A green place lost in the woods and a herd of black swine.
They came and went and the mist moved round them again.
The mist was not death. He was used to death by now,
But the mist still puzzled him, sometimes.
It was curious—being so weak and yet, used to death.
When you were strong, you thought of death as a strong
Rider on a black horse, perhaps, or at least
As some strong creature, dreadful because so strong.
But when you were weak and lived in a place like this,
Things changed. There was nothing strong about death any more,
He was only the gnawed rat-bone on the dirty floor,
That you stumbled across and hardly bothered to curse.
That was all. The two Michigan men had died last night.
The Ohio brothers were going to die this week,
You got pretty soon so you knew when people would die,
It passed the time as well as carving bone-rings
Playing checkers with straws or learning Italian nouns
From the lanky schoolteacher-sergeant from Vermont.
Somewhere, sometime, in a tent, by a red loud noise,
Under a dirty coat and a slab of tobacco,
He had lost a piece of himself, a piece of life.
He couldn’t die till he got that piece of him back
And felt its ragged edges fit in his heart.
Or so he thought. Sometimes, when he slept, he felt
As if he were getting it back—but most of the time
It was only the mist and counting the flies that bothered him.
He heard a footstep near him and turned his head.
“Hello, Charley,” he said. “Where you been?” Bailey’s face looked strange,
The red, hot face of a hurt and angry boy,
“Out hearing the Rebs,” he said. He spat on the floor
And broke into long, blue curses. When he was through,
“Did you hear them?” he asked. Jack Ellyat tried to remember
A gnat-noise buzzing the mist. “I guess so,” he said.
“What was it? Two-bottle Ed on another tear?”
“Hell,” said Bailey. “They cheered. They’ve licked us again.
The news just come. It happened back at Bull Run.”
“You’re crazy,” said Ellyat. “That was the start of the war.
“I was in that one.” “Oh, don’t be a fool,” said Bailey,
“They licked us again, I tell you, the same old place.
Pope’s army’s ruined.” “Who’s he?” said Ellyat wearily.
“Aw, we had him out West—he’s God Almighty’s pet horse,
He came East and told all the papers how good he was,
‘Headquarters in the saddle’!” Bailey snickered.
“Well, they snaffled his saddle and blame near snaffled him,
Jackson and Lee—anyhow they licked us again.”
“What about Little Mac?” “Well, Gawd knows what’s happened to him,”
Said Bailey, flatly, “Maybe he’s captured, too,
Maybe they captured Old Abe and everyone else.
I don’t know—you can’t tell from those lyin’ Rebs.”
There was a silence. Ellyat lay on his back
And watched the flies on the wall for quite a long time.
“I wish I had a real newspaper,” said Bailey,
“Not one of your Richmond wipers. By God, you know, Jack,
When we get back home, I’ll read a newspaper, sometimes.
I never was much at readin’ the newspaper
But I’d like to read one now, say once in a while.”
Ellyat laughed. “You know, Charley,” he said at last.
“We’ve got to get out of this place.” Bailey joined in the laugh.
Then he stopped and stared at the other with anxious eyes.
“You don’t look crazy,” he said. “Stop countin’ those flies.”
Ellyat raised himself on one arm. “No, honest, Charley,
I mean it, damn it. We’ve got to get out of here.
I know we can’t but we’ve got to. …” He swallowed dryly.
“Look here—” he said, “It just came over me then.
I’ve got a girl and she doesn’t know where I am.
I left her back in a tent—no, that wasn’t a girl—
And you say we got licked again. But that’s just it, Charley.
We get licked too much. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He sank back to the floor and shut his ghost-ridden eyes.
Bailey regarded him for a long, numb moment.
“You couldn’t walk a mile and a half,” he muttered,
“And, by God, I couldn’t carry you twenty feet,
And, by God, if we could, there ain’t no way to get out,
But all the same—” “If there was any use tryin’,”
He said, half-pleadingly, half-defiantly,
“I tell you, Jack, if there was any use tryin’—”
He stopped. Ellyat’s eyes were shut. He rose with great care.
“I’ll get you some water,” he muttered. “No, let you sleep.”
He sat down again and stared at the sleeping face.
“He looks bad,” he thought. “I guess I look bad myself.
I guess the kid’s goin’ to die if we don’t get out.
I guess we’re both goin’ to die. I don’t see why not.”
He looked up at the flies on the ceiling and shook his fist.
“Listen, you dirty Rebs,” he said, under his breath,
“Flap your goddam wings—we’re goin’ to get out of here!”
John Brown lies dead in his grave and does not stir,
It is nearly three years since he died and he does not stir,
There is no sound in his bones but the sound of armies
And that is an old sound.
He walks, you will say, he walks in front of the armies,
A straggler
