Classic Poem

It was Private Blair, of the regulars, before dread El Caney,
Who felt with every throb of his wound the life-tide ebb away;
And as he dwelt in a fevered dream on the home of his youthful years,
He heard near by the moan and sigh of two of the volunteers.

He raised him up and gazed at them, and likely lads they were,
But when he bade them pluck up heart he found they could not stir.
Then a bullet ploughed the sodden loam, and his fearless face grew dark,
For he saw through the blur a sharpshooter who made the twain his mark.

And his strength leaped into his limbs again, and his fading eye burned bright;
And he gripped his gun with a steady hand and glanced along the sight:
Then another voice in that choir of fire outspake with a deadly stress,
And in the trench at El Caney there lurked a Spaniard less.

But still the moans of the volunteers went up through the murky air,
And there kindled the light of a noble thought in the brain of Private Blair.
The flask at his side, he had drained it dry in the blistering scorch and shine,
So, unappalled, he crept and crawled in the face of the firing line.

The whirring bullets sped o'erhead, and the great shells burst with a roar,
And the shrapnel tore the ground around like the tusks of the grisly boar;
But on he went, with his high intent, till he covered the space between,
And came to the place where the Spaniard lay and clutched his full canteen.

Then he writhed him back o'er the bloody track, while Death drummed loud in his cars,
And pressed the draught he would fain have quaffed to the lips of the volunteers.
Drink! cried he; don't think of me, for I 'm only a regular ,
While you have homes in the mother-land where your waiting loved ones are.

Then his soul was sped to the peace of the dead. All praise to the men who dare,
And honor be from sea to sea to the deed of Private Blair!