Chickamauga (16 page)

Meanwhile, Lee rides through the heart of the Cum berland.

A great hot sunset colors the marching men,

Colors the horse and the sword and the bearded face

But cannot change that face from its strong repose.

And—miles away—Joe Hooker, by telegraph

Calls for the garrison left at Harper’s Ferry

To join him. Elbow-rubbing Halleck refuses.

Hooker resigns command—and fades from the East

To travel West, fight keenly at Lookout Mountain,

Follow Sherman’s march as far as Atlanta,

Be ranked by Howard, and tartly resigns once more

Before the end and the fame and the Grand Review,

To die a slow death, in bed, with his fire gone out,

A campfire quenched and forgotten. He deserved

A better and brusquer end that marched with his nickname,

This disappointed, hot-tempered, most human man

Who had such faith in himself except for once,

And the once, being Chancellorsville, wiped out the rest.

He was often touchy and life was touchy with him,

But the last revenge was a trifle out of proportion.

Such things will happen—Jackson went in his strength,

Stuart was riding his horse when the bullet took him,

And Custer died to the trumpet—Dutch Longstreet lived

To quarrel and fight dead battles. Lee passed in si lence.

McClellan talked on forever in word and print.

Grant lived to be President. Thomas died sick at heart.

So Hooker goes from our picture—and a spent aide

Reaches Meade’s hut at three o’clock in the morning

To wake him with unexpected news of command.

The thin Pennsylvanian puts on his spectacles

To read the order. Tall, sad-faced, and austere,

He has the sharp, long nose of a fighting-bird,

A prudent mouth and a cool, considering mind.

An iron-gray man with none of Hooker’s panache,

But resolute and able, well skilled in war;

They call him “the damned old goggle-eyed snapping- turtle”

At times, and he does not call out the idol-shout

When he rides his lines, but his prudence is a hard prudence,

And can last out storms that break the men with pa nache,

Though it summons no counter-storm when the storm is done.

His sombre schoolmaster-eyes read the order well.

It is three days before the battle. He thinks at first

Of a grand review, gives it up, and begins to act.

That morning a spy brings news to Lee in his tent

That the Union army has moved and is on the march.

Lee calls back Ewell and Early from their forays

And summons his host together by the cross-roads

Where Getty came with his ox-cart. So now we see

These two crab-armies fumbling for each other,

As if through a fog of rumor and false report,

These last two days of sleepy, hay-harvest June.

Hot June lying asleep on a shock of wheat

Where the pollen-wind blows over the burnt-gold stubble

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.

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.

The battle of the first day was a minor battle

As such are counted. That is, it killed many men.

Killed more than died at Bull Run, left thousands stricken

With wounds that time might heal for a little while

Or never heal till the breath was out of the flesh.

The First Corps lost half its number in killed and wounded.

The pale-faced women, huddled behind drawn blinds

Back in the town, or in apple-cellars, hiding,

Thought it the end of the world, no doubt. And yet,

As the books remark, it was only a minor battle.

There were only two corps engaged on the Union side,

Longstreet had not yet come up, nor Ewell’s whole force,

Hill’s corps lacked a division till evening fell.

It was only a minor battle. When the first shot

Clanged out, it was fired from a clump of Union vedettes

Holding a farm in the woods beyond the town.

The farmer was there to hear it—and then to see

The troopers scramble back on their restless horses

And go off, firing, as a grey mass came on.

He must have been a peaceable man, that farmer.

It is said that he died of what he had heard and seen

In that one brief moment, although no bullet came near him

And the storm passed by and did not burst on his farm.

No doubt he was easily frightened. He should have reflected

That even minor battles are hardly the place

For peaceable men—but he died instead, it is said.

There were other deaths that day, as of Smiths and Clancys,

Otises, Boyds, Virginia and Pennsylvania,

New York, Carolina, Wisconsin, the gathered West,

The tattered Southern marchers dead on the wheat- shocks.

Among these deaths a few famous. Reynolds is dead,

The model soldier, gallant and courteous,

Shot from his saddle in the first of the fight.

He was Doubleday’s friend, but Doubleday has no time

To grieve him, the Union right being driven in

And Heth’s Confederates pressing on toward the town.

He holds the onrush back till Howard comes up

And takes command for a while. The fighting is grim.

Meade has heard the news. He sends Hancock up to the field.

Hancock takes command in mid-combat. The grey comes on.

Five color-bearers are killed at one Union color,

The last man, dying, still holds up the sagging flag.

The pale-faced women creeping out of their houses,

Plead with retreating bluecoats, “Don’t leave us, boys,

Stay with us—hold the town.” Their faces are thin,

Their words come tumbling out of a frightened mouth.

In a field, far off, a peaceable farmer puts

His hands to his ears, still hearing that one sharp shot

That he will hear and hear till he dies of it.

It is Hill and Ewell now against Hancock and Howard

And a confused, wild clamor—and the high keen

Of the Rebel yell—and the shrill-edged bullet song

Beating down men and grain, while the sweaty fight ers

Grunt as they ram their charges with blackened hands.

Till Hancock and Howard are beaten away at last,

Outnumbered and outflanked, clean out of the town,

Retreating as best they can to a fish-hook ridge,

And the clamor dies and the sun is going down

And the tired men think about food. The dust-bitten staff

Of Ewell, riding along through the captured streets,

Hear the thud of a bullet striking their general.

Flesh or bone? Death-wound or rub of the game?

“The general’s hurt!” They gasp and volley their questions.

Ewell turns his head like a bird, “No, I’m not hurt, sir,

But, supposing the ball had struck you, General Gordon,

We’d have the trouble of carrying you from the field.

You can see how much better fixed for a fight I am.

It don’t hurt a mite to be shot in your wooden leg.”

So it ends. Lee comes on the field in time to see

The village taken, the Union wave in retreat.

Meade will not reach the ground till one the next morning.

So it ends, this lesser battle of the first day,

Starkly disputed and piecemeal won and lost

By corps-commanders who carried no magic plans

Stowed in their sleeves, but fought and held as they could.

It is past. The board is staked for the greater game

Which is to follow—The beaten Union brigades

Recoil from the cross-roads town that they tried to hold,

And so recoiling, rest on a destined ground.

Who chose that ground? There are claimants enough in the books.

Howard thanked by Congress for choosing it

As doubtless, they would have thanked him as well had he

Chosen another, once the battle was won,

And there are a dozen ifs on the Southern side,

How, in that first day’s evening, if one had known,

If Lee had been there in time, if Jackson had lived,

The heights that cost so much blood in the vain at tempt

To take days later, could have been taken then.

And the ifs and the thanks and the rest are all true enough

But we can only say, when we look at the board,

“There it happened. There is the way of the land.

There was the fate, and there the blind swords were crossed.”

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 swear ing,

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.

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.