And talked with a man named Lincoln. The sword was still in his hand.
He had gone out with fifteen thousand. He came back to his lines with five.
He fought well till the war was over, but a thing was cracked in his heart.
Wingate, waiting the sultry sound
That would pour the troop over hostile ground,
Petted his grey like a loving son
And wondered whether the brute would run
When it came to fighting, or merely shy
There was a look in the rolling eye
That he knew too well to criticize
Having seen it sometimes in other eyes.
“Poor old Fatty,” he said. “Don’t fret,
It’s tough, but it hasn’t happened yet
And we may get through it if you behave,
Though it looks just now like a right close shave.
There’s something funny about this fight—”
He thought of Lucy in candlelight,
White and gold as the evening star,
Giving bright ribbons to men at war.
But the face grew dimmer and ever dimmer,
The gold was there but the gold was fainter,
And a slow brush streaked it with something grimmer
Than the proper tint of a lady’s painter
Till the shadow she cast was a ruddy shadow.
He rubbed his eyes and stared at the meadow. …
“There was a girl I used to go with,
Long ago, when the skies were cooler,
There was a tree we used to grow with
Marking our heights with a stolen ruler.
There was a cave where we hid and fought once.
There was a pool where the wind kept writing.
There was a possum-child we caught once.
Caged it awhile, for all its biting.
There was a gap in a fence to see there,
Down where the sparrows were always wrangling.
There was a girl who used to be there,
Dark and thin, with her long braids dangling.
Dark and thin in her scuffed brown slippers
With a boy’s sling stuck in her apron-pocket,
With a sting in her tongue like a gallinipper’s
And the eyes of a ghost in a silver locket.
White and gold, white and gold,
You cannot be cold as she was cold,
Cold of the air and the running stream
And cold of the ice-tempered dream.
Gold and white, gold and white,
You burn with the heat of candlelight.
But what if I set you down alone
Beside the burning meteor-stone?
Blow North, blow South, blow hot, blow cold,
My body is pledged to white and gold,
My honor given to kith and kin,
And my doom-clothes ready to wrap me in
For the shut heart and the open hand
As long as Wingate Hall shall stand
And the fire burn and the water cool
And a fool beget another fool—
But now, in the hour before this fight,
I have forgotten gold and white.
I will remember lost delight.
She has the Appleton mouth, it seems,
And the Appleton way of riding,
But if she quarrels or when she gleams,
Something comes out from hiding.
She can sew all day on an Appleton hem
And look like a saint in plaster,
But when the fiddles begin to play,
And her feet beat fast but her heart beats faster,
An alien grace is alive in them
And she looks like her father, the dancing-master,
The scapegrace elegant, ‘French Dupré.’ ”
Then the word came and the bugle sang
And he was part of the running clang,
The rush and the shock and the sabres licking
And the fallen horses screaming and kicking.
His grey was tired and his arm unsteady
And he whirled like a leaf in a shrieking eddy
Where every man was fighting his neighbor
And there was no room for the tricks of sabre
But only a wild and nightmare sickling.
His head felt burnt—there was something trickling
Into his eyes—then the new charge broke
The eddy apart like scattered smoke;
The cut on his head half made him blind.
If he had a mind, he had lost that mind.
He came to himself in a battered place,
Staring at Wainscott Bristol’s face,
The dried blood made it a ferret’s mask.
“What happened?” he croaked. “Well, you can ask,”
Said Bristol, drawling, “But don’t ask me,
For any facts of the jamboree.
I reckon we’ve been to an Irish wake
Or maybe cuttin’ a johnny-cake
With most of the Union cavalry-corps.
I don’t know yet, but it was a war.
Are you crazy still? You were for a piece.
You yelled you were Destiny’s long-lost niece
And wanted to charge the whole Yank line
Because they’d stolen your valentine.
You fought like a fool but you talked right wild.
You got a bad bump, too.” Wingate smiled
“I reckon I did, but I don’t know when.
Did we win or what?” “And I say again,”
Said Bristol, heavily, “don’t ask me.
Inquire of General Robert Lee.
I know we’re in for a long night ride
And they say we got whipped on the other side.
What’s left of the Troop are down by the road.
We lost John Leicester and Harry Spode
And the Lawley boys and Ballantyne.
The Major’s all right—but there’s Jim Devine
And Francis Carroll and Judson White—
I wish I had some liquor tonight.”
Wingate touched the cut on his head.
It burned, but it no longer bled.
“I wish I could sleep ten years,” he said.
The night of the third day falls. The battle is done.
Lee entrenches that night upon Seminary Ridge.
All next day the battered armies still face each other
Like enchanted beasts. Lee thinks he may be attacked,
Hopes for it, perhaps, is not, and prepares his retreat.
Vicksburg has fallen, hollow Vicksburg has fallen,
The cavedwellers creep from their caves and blink at the sun.
The pan of the Southern balance goes down and down.
The cotton is withering.
Army of Northern Virginia, haggard and tattered,
Tramping back on the pikes, through the dust-white summer,
With your wounds still fresh, your burden of prisoners,
Your burden of sick and wounded,
“One long groan of human anguish six miles long.”
You reach the swollen Potomac at long last,
A foe behind, a risen river in front,
And fording that swollen river, in the dim starlight,
In the yellow and early dawn,
Still have heart enough for the tall, long-striding soldiers
To mock the short, half swept away by the stream.
“Better change our name to Lee’s Waders, boys!”
“Come on you shorty—get a ride on my back.”
“Aw, it’s just we ain’t had a bath in seven years
And General Lee, he knows we need a good bath.”
So you splash and slip through the water and come at last
Safe, to the Southern side,
