Who comes up with a roar but the provost-guard?
Did we get any pies? I guess you know if we did.
I couldn’t spit for an hour, I felt so mad.
Next war I’m goin’ to be provost-guard or bust.”
A thin voice said abruptly, “They’re moving—lookit—
They’re moving, I tell you—lookit—” They all looked then.
A little crackling noise as of burning thornsticks
Began far away—ceased wholly—began again—
“We won’t get it awhile,” thought Ellyat. “They’re trying the left.
We won’t get it awhile, but we’ll get it soon.
I feel funny today. I don’t think I’m going to be killed
But I feel funny. That’s their whole army all right.
I wonder if those other two felt like this,
John Haberdeen and the corporal from Millerstown?
What’s it like to see your name on a bullet?
It must feel queer. This is going to be a big one.
The Johnnies know it. That house looks pretty down there.
Phaëton, charioteer in your drunken car,
What have you got for a man that carries my name?
We’re a damn good company now, if we say it ourselves,
And the Old Man knows it—but this one’s bound to be tough.
I wonder what they’re feeling like over there.
Charioteer, you were driving yesterday,
No doubt, but I did not see you. I see you now.
What have you got today for a man with my name?”
The firing began that morning at nine o’clock,
But it was three before the attacks were launched.
There were two attacks, one a drive on the Union left
To take the Round Tops, the other one on the right.
Lee had planned them to strike together and, striking so,
Cut the Union snake in three pieces. It did not happen.
On the left, Dutch Longstreet, slow, pugnacious and stubborn,
Hard to beat and just as hard to convince,
Has his own ideas of the battle and does not move
For hours after the hour that Lee had planned,
Though, when he does, he moves with pugnacious strength.
Facing him, in the valley before the Round Tops,
Sickles thrusts out blue troops in a weak right angle,
Some distance from the Ridge, by the Emmettsburg pike.
There is a peach orchard there, a field of ripe wheat
And other peaceable things soon not to be peaceful.
They say the bluecoats, marching through the ripe wheat,
Made a blue-and-yellow picture that men remember
Even now in their age, in their crack-voiced age.
They say the noise was incessant as the sound
Of all wolves howling, when that attack came on.
They say, when the guns all spoke, that the solid ground
Of the rocky ridges trembled like a sick child.
We have made the sick earth tremble with other shakings
In our time, in our time, in our time, but it has not taught us
To leave the grain in the field. So the storm came on
Yelling against the angle. The men who fought there
Were the tried fighters, the hammered, the weather-beaten,
The very hard-dying men. They came and died
And came again and died and stood there and died,
Till at last the angle was crumpled and broken in,
Sickles shot down, Willard, Barlow and Semmes shot down,
Wheatfield and orchard bloody and trampled and taken,
And Hood’s tall Texans sweeping on toward the Round Tops
As Hood fell wounded. On Little Round Top’s height
Stands a lonely figure, seeing that rush come on—
Greek-mouthed Warren, Meade’s chief of engineers.
—Sometimes, and in battle even, a moment comes
When a man with eyes can see a dip in the scales
And, so seeing, reverse a fortune. Warren has eyes
And such a moment comes to him now. He turns
—In a clear flash seeing the crests of the Round Tops taken,
The grey artillery there and the battle lost—
And rides off hell-for-leather to gather troops
And bring them up in the very nick of time,
While the grey rush still advances, keening its cry.
The crest is three times taken and then retaken
In fierce wolf-flurries of combat, in gasping Iliads
Too rapid to note or remember, too obscure to freeze in a song.
But at last, when the round sun drops, when the nun-footed night,
Dark-veiled walker, holding the first weak stars
Like children against her breast, spreads her pure cloths there,
The Union still holds the Round Tops and the two hard keys of war.
Night falls. The blood drips in the rocks of the Devil’s Den.
The murmur begins to rise from the thirsty ground
Where the twenty thousand dead and wounded lie.
Such was Longstreet’s war, and such the Union defence,
The deaths and the woundings, the victory and defeat
At the end of the fish-hook shank. And so Longstreet failed
Ere Ewell and Early struck the fish-hook itself
At Culp’s Hill and the Ridge and at Cemetery Hill,
With better fortune, though not with fortune enough
To plant hard triumph deep on the sharp-edged rocks
And break the scales of the snake. When that last attack
Came, with its cry, Jack Ellyat saw it come on.
They had been waiting for hours on that hard hill,
Sometimes under fire, sometimes untroubled by shells.
A man chewed a stick of grass and hummed to himself.
Another played mumbledeypeg with a worn black knife.
Two men were talking girls till they got too mad
And the sergeant stopped them. Then they waited again.
Jack Ellyat waited, hearing that other roar
Rise and fall, be distant and then approach.
Now and then he turned on his side and looked at the sky
As if to build a house of peace from that blue,
But could find no house of peace there. Only the roar,
The slow sun sinking, the fey touch at his mind. …
He was lying behind a tree and a chunk of rock
On thick, coarse grass. Farther down the slope of the hill
There were houses, a rough stone wall, and blue loungy men.
Behind them lay the batteries on the crest.
He wondered if there were people still in the houses.
One house had a long, slant roof. He followed the slant
Of the roof with his finger, idly, pleased with the line.
The shelling burst out from the Southern guns again.
Their own batteries answered behind them. He looked at his house
While the shells came down. I’d like to live in that house.
Now the shelling lessened. The man with the old black knife
Shut up the knife and began to baby his rifle.
They’re coming, Jack thought. This is
