There was the fate, and there the blind swords were crossed.”
You took a carriage to that battlefield.
Now, I suppose, you take a motor-bus,
But then, it was a carriage—and you ate
Fried chicken out of wrappings of waxed paper,
While the slow guide buzzed on about the war
And the enormous, curdled summer clouds
Piled up like giant cream puffs in the blue.
The carriage smelt of axle-grease and leather
And the old horse nodded a sleepy head
Adorned with a straw hat. His ears stuck through it.
It was the middle of hay-fever summer
And it was hot. And you could stand and look
All the way down from Cemetery Ridge,
Much as it was, except for monuments
And startling groups of monumental men
Bursting in bronze and marble from the ground,
And all the curious names upon the gravestones. …
So peaceable it was, so calm and hot,
So tidy and great-skied. No men had fought
There but enormous, monumental men
Who bled neat streams of uncorrupting bronze,
Even at the Round Tops, even by Pickett’s boulder,
Where the bronze, open book could still be read
By visitors and sparrows and the wind:
And the wind came, the wind moved in the grass,
Saying … while the long light … and all so calm …
“Pickett came
And the South came
And the end came,
And the grass comes
And the wind blows
On the bronze book
On the bronze men
On the grown grass,
And the wind says
‘Long ago
Long
Ago.’ ”
Then it was time to buy a paperweight
With flags upon it in decalcomania
And hope you wouldn’t break it, driving home.
Draw a clumsy fish-hook now on a piece of paper,
To the left of the shank, by the bend of the curving hook,
Draw a Maltese cross with the top block cut away.
The cross is the town. Nine roads star out from it
East, West, South, North. And now, still more to the left
Of the lopped-off cross, on the other side of the town,
Draw a long, slightly-wavy line of ridges and hills
Roughly parallel to the fish-hook shank.
(The hook of the fish-hook is turned away from the cross
And the wavy line.) There your ground and your ridges lie.
The fish-hook is Cemetery Ridge and the North
Waiting to be assaulted—the wavy line
Seminary Ridge whence the Southern assault will come.
The valley between is more than a mile in breadth.
It is some three miles from the lowest jut of the cross
To the button at the far end of the fish-hook shank,
Big Round Top, with Little Round Top not far away.
Both ridges are strong and rocky, well made for war.
But the Northern one is the stronger shorter one.
Lee’s army must spread out like an uncoiled snake
Lying along a fence-rail, while Meade’s can coil
Or halfway coil, like a snake part clung to a stone.
Meade has the more men and the easier shifts to make,
Lee the old prestige of triumph and his tried skill.
His task is—to coil his snake round the other snake
Halfway clung to the stone, and shatter it so,
Or to break some point in the shank of the fish-hook line
And so cut the snake in two. Meade’s task is to hold.
That is the chess and the scheme of the wooden blocks
Set down on the contour map. Having learned so much,
Forget it now, while the ripple-lines of the map
Arise into bouldered ridges, tree-grown, bird-visited,
Where the gnats buzz, and the wren builds a hollow nest
And the rocks are grey in the sun and black in the rain,
And the jacks-in-the-pulpit grow in the cool, damp hollows.
See no names of leaders painted upon the blocks
Such as “Hill,” or “Hancock,” or “Pender”— but see instead
Three miles of living men—three long double miles
Of men and guns and horses and fires and wagons,
Teamsters, surgeons, generals, orderlies,
A hundred and sixty thousand living men
Asleep or eating or thinking or writing brief
Notes in the thought of death, shooting dice or swearing,
Groaning in hospital wagons, standing guard
While the slow stars walk through heaven in silver mail,
Hearing a stream or a joke or a horse cropping grass
Or hearing nothing, being too tired to hear.
All night till the round sun comes and the morning breaks,
Three double miles of live men.
Listen to them, their breath goes up through the night
In a great chord of life, in the sighing murmur
Of wind-stirred wheat. A hundred and sixty thousand
Breathing men, at night, on two hostile ridges set down.
Jack Ellyat slept that night on the rocky ground
Of Cemetery Hill while the cold stars marched,
And if his bed was harder than Jacob’s stone
Yet he could sleep on it now and be glad for sleep.
He had been through Chancellorsville and the whistling wood,
He had been through this last day. It is well to sleep
After such days. He had seen, in the last four months,
Many roads, much weather and death, and two men fey
Before they died with the prescience of death to come,
John Haberdeen and the corporal from Millerstown.
Such things are often remembered even in sleep.
He thought to himself, before he lay on the ground,
“We got it hot today in that red-brick town
But we’ll get it hotter tomorrow.” And when he woke
And saw the round sun risen in the clear sky,
He could feel that thought steam up from the rocky ground
And touch each man. One man looked down from the hill,
“That must be their whole damn army,” he said and whistled,
“It’ll be a picnic today, boys. Yes, it’ll be
A regular basket-picnic.” He whistled again.
“Shut your trap about picnics, Ace,” said another man,
“You make me too damn hungry!” He sighed out loud.
“We had enough of a picnic at Chancellorsville,”
He said. “I ain’t felt right in my stummick since.
Can you make ’em out?” “Sure,” said Ace, “but they’re pretty far.”
“Wonder who we’ll get? That bunch we got yesterday
Was a mean-shootin’ bunch.” “Now don’t you worry,” said Ace,
“We’ll get plenty.” The other man sighed again.
“Did you see that darky woman selling hot pies,
Two days ago, on the road?” he said, licking his lips,
“Blackberry pies. The boys ahead got a lot
And Jake and me clubbed together for three. And then
Just
