And the thirsty men march past, stirring thick grey dust
From the trodden pikes—till at last, the crab-claws touch
At Getty’s town, and clutch, and the peaches fall
Cut by the bullets, splashing under the trees.
That meeting was not willed by a human mind,
When we come to sift it. You say a fate rode a horse
Ahead of those lumbering hosts, and in either hand
He carried a skein of omen. And when, at last,
He came to a certain umbrella-copse of trees
That never had heard a cannon or seen dead men,
He knotted the skeins together and flung them down
With a sound like metal. Perhaps. It may have been so.
All that we know is—Meade intended to fight
Some fifteen miles away on the Pipe Creek Line
And where Lee meant to fight him, if forced to fight,
We do not know, but it was not there where they fought.
Yet the riding fate,
Blind and deaf and a doom on a lunging horse,
Threw down his skeins and gathered the battle there.
The buttercup-meadows
Are very yellow.
A child comes there
To fill her hands.
The gold she gathers
Is soft and precious
As sweet new butter
Fresh from the churn.
She fills her frock
With the yellow flowers,
The butter she gathers
Is smooth as gold,
Little bright cups
Of new-churned sunshine
For a well-behaved
Hoop-skirted doll.
Her frock’s full
And her hands are mothy
With yellow pollen
But she keeps on.
Down by the fence
They are even thicker.
She runs, bowed down with
Buttercup-gold.
She sees a road
And she sees a rider.
His face is grey
With a different dust.
He talks loud.
He rattles like tinware.
He has a long sword
To kill little girls.
He shouts at her now,
But she does not answer.
“Where is the town?”
But she will not hear.
There are other riders
Jangling behind him.
“We won’t hurt you, youngster!”
But they have swords.
The buttercups fall
Like spilt butter.
She runs away.
She runs to her house.
She hides her face
In her mother’s apron
And tries to tell her
How dreadful it was.
Buford came to Gettysburg late that night
Riding West with his brigades of blue horse,
While Pettigrew and his North Carolinians
Were moving East toward the town with a wagon-train,
Hoping to capture shoes. The two came in touch.
Pettigrew halted and waited for men and orders.
Buford threw out his pickets beyond the town.
The next morning was July first. It was hot and calm.
On the grey side, Heth’s division was ready to march
And drive the blue pickets in. There was still no thought
Of a planned and decisive battle on either side
Though Buford had seen the strength of those two hill-ridges
Soon enough to be famous, and marked one down
As a place to rally if he should be driven back.
He talks with his staff in front of a tavern now.
An officer rides up from the near First Corps.
“What are you doing here, sir?” The officer
Explains. He, too, has come there to look for shoes.
—Fabulous shoes of Gettysburg, dead men’s shoes,
Did anyone ever wear you, when it was done,
When the men were gone, when the farms were spoiled with the bones,
What became of your nails and leather? The swords went home,
The swords went into museums and neat glass cases,
The swords look well there. They are clean from the war.
You wouldn’t put old shoes in a neat glass case,
Still stuck with the mud of marching. And yet, a man
With a taste for such straws and fables, blown by the wind,
Might hide a pair in a labelled case sometime
Just to see how the leather looked, set down by the swords.
The officer is hardly through with his tale
When Buford orders him back to his command.
“Why, what is the matter, general?” As he speaks
The far-off hollow slam of a single gun
Breaks the warm stillness. The horses prick up their ears.
“That’s the matter,” says Buford and gallops away.
Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian,
Marched toward Getty’s town past orderly fences,
Thinking of harvest. The boy was growing up strong
And the corn-haired woman was smart at managing things
But it was a shame what you had to pay hired men now
Though they’d had good crops last year and good prices too.
The crops looked pretty this summer. He stared at the long
Gold of the wheat reflectively, weighing it all,
Turning it into money and cows and taxes,
A new horse-reaper, some first-class paint for the barn,
Maybe a dress for the woman. His thoughts were few,
But this one tasted rough and good in his mouth
Like a spear of rough, raw grain. He crunched at it now.
—And yet, that wasn’t all, the paint and the cash,
They were the wheat but the wheat was—he didn’t know—
But it made you feel good to see some good wheat again
And see it grown up proper. He wasn’t a man
To cut a slice of poetry from a farm.
He liked the kind of manure that he knew about
And seldom burst into tears when his horses died
Or found a beautiful thought in a bumblebee,
But now, as he tramped along like a laden steer,
The tall wheat, rustling, filled his heart with its sound.
Look at that column well, as it passes by,
Remembering Bull Run and the cocksfeather hats,
The congressmen, the raw militia brigades
Who went to war with a flag and a haircloth trunk
In bright red pants and ideals and ignorance,
Ready to fight like picture-postcard boys
While fighting still had banners and a sword
And just as ready to run in blind mob-panic. …
These men were once those men. These men are the soldiers,
Good thieves, good fighters, excellent foragers,
The grumbling men who dislike to be killed in war
And yet will hold when the raw militia break
And live where the raw militia needlessly die,
Having been schooled to that end. The school is not
A pretty school. They wear no cocksfeather hats.
Some men march in their drawers and their stocking feet.
They have handkerchiefs round their heads, they are footsore and chafed,
Their faces are sweaty leather. And when they pass
The little towns where the people wish them godspeed,
A few are touched by the cheers and the crying women
But most have seen a number of crying women,
