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Orders in the Hands of God

The Book of Revelation has a scroll

of writing coming out an angel’s mouth

as if to say, “These words are from the Lord.”

Well, Lee’s orders made in duplicate sent

to all four corners of our army found

their men. Stonewall Jackson committed them

to memory, then tore the order up;

and so did Lafayette McLaws, promptly.

Old Peter Longstreet, making sure, reversed

the picture in Revelation, stuffing

the paper into his mouth—chewed it up

and spat the ugly mush back out—as good

as never issued, except in his mind.

And Harvey Hill was many things, but careless

was not one of them. Yet he was blamed.

As good a general as he was, he never

could get right with the Old Man, or Jackson,

or anybody else. His own men liked

him well enough. He thought well and fought well

but seemed meant to be alone, which is how

he spent most of the war after Sharpsburg:

independent command, outposts, defenses—

brooding on the Will of God perhaps: why,

exactly, someone dropped a copy, wrapped

around three seegars; and why, exactly,

some damnyankee soldier boys happened to

take a rest in just that field, in that green

pasture, beside some still water, and spot

those seegars with the sharp eye only Yanks

have got, and bored or thinking, actually read

the paper tied with string around the smokes—

signed by Lee’s adjutant, the signature

recognized by a Yankee officer—

and that, they say, made all the difference.

Well, I don’t know. You’d like to think nobody

beat us, short of God Himself, least of all

an army full of nothing but Yankees—

but that Potomac army was the best

of any on the planet, except for one

which modesty forbids my mentioning.

Which is why I say Never, do not ever,

underestimate a people who fight

for principle, however self-righteous,

irreligious, and murderous it is.

I am saying that the reason the Army

of the Potomac had the dumb luck

or was given our plans by the clean hand

of Providence, was that they were coming

after us in the first place. Those Yankee

boys in that meadow were on our track, if

the truth be told. They had been whipped all summer,

outgeneralled and humiliated,

but they were not defeated. We were better,

keep in mind, so let them come: we would turn

and fight them. And that is what Harvey Hill

did, his men all alone, the way he wanted,

on South Mountain, while the rest of the Army

tried to concentrate. See, many a time

our fast-marching boys would be forced to tell

a gaggle of chatty Marylanders,

“Beg pardon, we are a-tryin’ to think.”

Well then, sometimes I’ve wondered what a battle

is a concentration of—rage, hatred,

fear, nobility, the devil’s spite; or

the deep and awful, gracious will of God—

or underneath it nothing like those things

at all, just chance. But what were the chances

in that farmer’s field, that our enemies

would find our orders so they could know what

to do? What concentration of the sky

appeared in that small field? Are blades of grass

planted by God’s hand? Are God’s marching orders

issued everywhere, copies stored in stones,

instructions in the beauty of the lilies—

His strategies strung somehow in the fragile

maps of the spider’s web, his plans waiting

as plain as the day, visible to us

and invisible to us? These quiet

fields are filled with unheard thunder, called up

by a voice we don’t hear. They have been spun

of the same stuff as angel wings; so we

spot only now and then, in fields murmuring

with careless voices, orders He has written.

*

We Stand and Fight

As in your sleep you tell your legs to run

but they don’t move; they are slow and heavy

like in water, chest pressing against water—

that was the nightmare of the long, late night

of the fourteenth, and the seared-eyed, parched-mouthed

stumbling morning of the fifteenth. Hill’s men,

staggering from all day’s fighting back at

South Mountain, mortified beyond all speech

to be running from the hordes of Yankees

for the first time, and damned if not the last,

skedaddling from the damnyankee army—

and damned thankful to get out with their lives—

ordered by the Old Man toward the River:

take the roads to Sharpsburg, cross the River

there, get back into Virginia before

the Federal army crushes every piece

of our five-way scattered band of brothers.

Longstreet’s boys marched fast from north and west while

McLaws, about to be caught by Yankees

to his north while he faced south at Harper’s

Ferry, training his guns at the Federal

arsenal and garrison, wondered what

to do: escape himself, or obey orders

calling for his men to block escape from

Harper’s Ferry by the Yanks? Walker’s men

stood on the heights across the River, east

of Harper’s Ferry, and Stonewall Jackson—

childish, I admit, the names we make up

in war, but in this case a solid comfort—

Stonewall with the largest part of the corps

circled Harper’s south and west, demanding

surrender. The Yankees helped us out—we

thought. Green troops ran back into town, letting

us have the heights on all sides, and when we

opened with artillery all around,

well, the officer in charge of those twelve

thousand men thought, It’s only a question

of time; might as well surrender now—save

some lives anyhow. If he’d have held on

one more day, there would have been no fight

at Sharpsburg. But he didn’t hold on. So

Deacon Jackson in his usual way, giving

praise to God but in the end not knowing

for what, sent General Lee a little note:

“Through God’s blessing,” he wrote, Harper’s Ferry,

with its stock of cannons, small arms, wagons,

food, and Yankees was to be offered up—

surrendered presently, that is; and that

did it.

Now, when the surrender took place,

the Yankee boys all stretched to get a look

at Mighty Stonewall. They were disappointed.

“He isn’t much for looks,” one said, “but if

we’d had him, boys, we wouldn’t have been caught

in this trap.” A reporter from New York—

New York Times no less, a man of taste—wrote

that Stonewall cut a shabby figure, dressed

in coarse homespun, worn and grimy; a hat

the likes of which any Northern beggar

would refuse if offered—in short a seedy

tramp no different in appearance from those

bearded, barefoot tramps that followed him—which

would have made you wonder, wouldn’t it, whether

God weren’t on the Southern side after all?

“They glory in their shame,” the reporter

wrote, and so we did. That Harper’s Ferry

crew laughed and joked, confident as crows, boasting

as anybody would, even Deacon

Jackson in his grim and pious way: “Through

God’s blessing,” he dispatched to Lee, and isn’t

that just how the Good Lord works? You never

know what He’s doing, and just when most you’re

satisfied He’s on your side, look out, here

it comes. So Lee got Stonewall’s message, knew

that within a day Jackson and the larger

half of his army could join him: he changed

his mind about retreat, thought the campaign

in Maryland was saved, looked at the high

ground behind Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg,

and said, “We will make our stand on these hills”—

and thus fulfilled again the ancient words,

The stouthearted are spoiled, have slept their sleep;

and none of the men of might have found their hands.

At thy rebuke, O God, both chariot and horse

are cast into a dead sleep. Surely

the wrath of man shall praise Thee.

*

Dunker Church, evening

That evening I sat in the Dunker Church

alone. Way off up cemetery way

the bump, bump now and then of our guns sounded,

and fainter, deeper, Yankee crews thumped back,

their heavy shot whistling toward that graveyard.

But birds still twittered in the trees around

the meeting house. It was just a square room,

as plain as biscuits on a clean-washed plate.

Against the north wall stood a bare table,

unpainted. On three sides, plank-backed benches.

The floorboards and plain benches gave the dry

rose smell of books a quiet schoolroom gives

in deep late summer, after months of heat

and standing empty in the afternoons.

The whitewashed walls bore no adornment but

the windows. What you see out such windows

looks more sharply colored for those white walls—

the clean walls, and that pure light of heaven—

green trees through hand-washed glass clearer than water—

and then some boys came in. They hushed at first

and then broke into talk and I stood up

and shuffled out. It was all right. I’d seen

what heaven is. I’d felt it in my lungs

and smelled it. This was what the great battle

was fought for. This is what we all wanted.

The battle’s center was the Dunker Church.

Old Jack is Here

When General Lee drew up his line behind

Antietam Creek that early afternoon,

we hadn’t but about fifteen thousand

worn-out, hungry, angry men. The Old Man stood

on Cemetery Hill, his hands still bandaged

from a fall, which must have made him just mad,

and looked across the middle bridge. He saw

the Yankee army, or half of it, forty

thousand, come down the Boonsboro Road, deploy

three miles along the Creek, place artillery—

some batteries of big twenty-pounders

included—on the high ground. McClellan