Classic Poem

Without a hillock stretched the plain;
For months we had not seen a hill;
The endless, flat Savannahs still
Wearied our eyes with waving cane.

One tangled cane-field lay before
The ambush of the cautious foe;
Behind a black bayou, with low
Reed-hidden, miry, treacherous shore;

A sullen swamp along the right,
Where alligators slept and crawled,
And moss-robed cypress giants sprawled
Athwart the noontide's blistering light.

Quick, angry spite of musketry
Proclaimed our skirmishers at work;
We saw their crouching figures lurk
Through thickets firing from the knee.

Our Parrotts felt the distant wood
With humming, shrieking, growling shell;
When suddenly the mouth of hell
Gaped fiercely for its human food.

A long and low blue roll of smoke
Curled up a hundred yards ahead,
And deadly storms of driving lead
From rifle-pits and cane-fields broke.

Then, while the bullets whistled thick,
And hidden batteries boomed and shelled,
" Charge bayonets! " the colonel yelled;
" Battalion forward, — double quick! "

With even slopes of bayonets
Advanced — a dazzling, threatening crest —
Right toward the rebels' hidden nest,
The dark blue, living billow sets.

The color-guard was at my side;
I heard the color-sergeant groan;
I heard the bullet crush the bone;
I might have touched him as he died.

The life-blood spouted from his mouth
And sanctified the wicked land;
Of martyred saviors what a band
Has suffered to redeem the South!

I had no malice in my mind;
I only cried: " Close up! guide right! "
My single purpose in the fight
Was steady march with eyes aligned.

I glanced along the martial rows,
And marked the soldiers eyeballs burn;
Their eager faces hot and stern, —
The wrathful triumph on their brows.

The traitors saw; they reeled and fled:
Fear-stricken, gray-clad multitudes
Streamed wildly toward the covering woods,
And left us victory and their dead.

Once more the march, the tiresome plain,
The Father River fringed with dykes,
Gray cypresses, palmetto spikes,
Bayous and swamps and yellowing canes;

With here and there plantations rolled
In flowers, bananas, orange groves,
Where laugh the sauntering negro droves,
Reposing from the task of old;

And rarer, half-deserted towns,
Devoid of men, where women scowl,
Avoiding us as lepers foul
With sidling gait and flouting gowns.