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
