Читать книгу Sharpsburg - Kent Gramm - Страница 8

The Army of the Free

The free are not free, only think they are—

but that makes all the difference in the world.

A soldier does exactly what he’s told,

more or less—such is life, and such is war:

nothing comes without its opposite.

To save your freedoms you become not free:

you fight for peace, and kill your enemies.

To save his life, the poet sits and writes,

renouncing everything for poetry.

And they went in and died to save their rights.

The poet calls on God to help him out—

I do so here—surrendering his mind,

though not his heart, and giving all to doubt.

The soldier writes his fortunes on the wind

and marches down a road of circumstance,

his every step a metrical decline

from that unchosen, free Nothing whence

he came. He is a child of God and chance

begotten in a short, shocking romance.

He lives only to hold that shaky line.

*

We saw the President in Washington

a few days after we had lost Bull Run

again—Old Abe the railsplitter, shirt-sleeved,

tilting awkward-tall as a whooping crane

over four soldiers on the White House lawn.

His lined face showed both cheerfulness and grief.

Wounded boys lay everywhere. He had come

out carrying a pail of lemonade

and got to talking. He was a good man.

You wanted to say, “We’ll do all we can,

Old Abe. We’ll settle up with them at the next

dance.” We knew the Rebs had crossed the Potomac

and filled the roads of central Maryland.

But it would be all right. Our Little Mac

would stir the Army back in shape and deal

with Bobby Lee at the right time. Our man,

McClellan was, like none after. To feel

devoted to a general makes an army—

the saucy graybacks had it; so did we.

You needed more than uniforms and steel

to win battles, and Mister Lincoln’s army,

the Army of the Potomac, would stay

the course until the gentlemen in gray,

who put their rights and so-called “property”

ahead of Old Glory and posterity,

would yield to justice and to law. Today

the Army rests, tomorrow binds its wounds,

and on the third day rises, shouldering

its knapsacks and its muskets to the sound

of its own bugles, and our men will sing

“John Brown’s Body” and “Rally Round the Flag,”

and we will meet them now on our own dear

Northern soil. We stepped with little straggling

in our brigade this time, and somewhere near

Frederick the pace picked up as if some charge

of lightning had been fed to headquarters.

You could sense sterner purpose in the march.

Some Indiana boys had found Lee’s orders

and now Little Mac and our generals knew

the Rebs had split. Now we knew what to do.

South Mountain

On the fourteenth we marched to South Mountain

from our camp near Frederick. The day was warm

and many of the boys just shed their twenty

extra cartridges. Carry sixty pounds

of knapsack, rations, steel—and there’s more harm

in too much weight than waste. Forty’s plenty.

Your piece would foul before you’d get past forty.

The Rebels bragged about how light they marched,

and so they did. And how, their blacks could tell.

We hoisted ours and carried it ourselves.

The Black Hat brigade drew the hardest task—

up Turner’s Gap astride the National Road.

It’s nothing but a steep ravine: trees, rocks,

and Rebels with that hatred in their souls

for Yanks that only Southerners can nurse—

two lines of them looking down at you behind

their muskets’ sights, smiling. A fifty-eight

calibre ball would knock you on your arse,

shatter bones, remove your face, or if fate

were kind, kill you. Such is the force of hate.

Our Little Mac was watching two miles back.

At first our rifles shone golden—the sun

a mass of yellow fire as we attacked

their skirmishers on green and level ground;

then silver, as we ascended the shadowed

slope in sudden twilight—our lines did slow

but did not stop; now bronze, lit by discharges

veiled in drifting gray: marching to Zion,

marching to Zion, something drove us hard.

McClellan said, “They must be made of iron.”

So we were named the Iron Brigade. That night

we stayed on the slope of South Mountain, not

quite at the top but close enough, not licked

and not going back down, slept with our heads

behind stones and trees and those who were shot.

In the morning the graybacks had gone, quick

as rabbits in the night. The way was open.

The Army of the Potomac poured through. One division

removed their caps, saluting us. We took it in our stride,

and left our friends dead on the mountainside.