Pickett's Charge by Stephen Vincent Benét

from John Brown's Body 

by Stephen Vincent Benét

Pickett's Charge

The cannonade fell still.  All along the fish-hook line,

The tired men stared at the smoke and waited for it to clear;

The men in the centre waited, their rifles gripped in their hands,

By the trees of the riding fate, and the low stone wall, and the

  guns.

These were Hancock's men, the men of the Second Corps,

Eleven States were mixed there, where Minnesota stood

In battle-order with Maine, and Rhode Island beside New York,

The metals of all the North, cooled into an axe of war.

The strong sticks of the North, bound into a fasces-shape,

The hard winters of snow, the wind with the cutting edge,

And against them came that summer that does not die with the year,

Magnolia and honeysuckle and the blue Virginia flag.

Tall Pickett went up to Longstreet--his handsome face was drawn.

George Pickett, old friend of Lincoln's in days gone by with the

  blast,

When he was a courteous youth and Lincoln the strange shawled man

Who would talk in a Springfield street with a boy who dreamt of a

sword.

Dreamt of a martial sword, as swords are martial in dreams,

And the courtesy to use it, in the old bright way of the tales.

Those days are gone with the blast.  He has his sword in his hand.

And he will use it today, and remember that using long.

He came to Longstreet for orders, but Longstreet would not speak.

He saw Old Peter's mouth and the thought in Old Peter's mind.

He knew the task that was set and the men that he had to lead

And a pride came into his face while Longstreet stood there dumb.

"I shall go forward, sir," he said and turned to his men.

The commands went down the line.  The grey ranks started to move.

Slowly at first, then faster, in order, stepping like deer,

The Virginians, the fifteen thousand, the seventh wave of the tide.

There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,

And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,

And behind that force another, fresh men who had not yet fought.

They started to cross that ground.  The guns began to tear them.

From the hill they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,

A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,

And yet, as it came, still closing, closing and rolling on,

As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left

  behind,

Spilled from that deadly march as a cart spills meal on a road,

And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,

And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

They halted but once to fire as they came.  Then the smoke closed

  down

And you could not see them, and then, as it cleared again for a

  breath,

They were coming still but divided, gnawed at by blue attacks,

One flank half-severed and halted, but the centre still like a tide.

Cushing ran down the last of his guns to the battle-line.

The rest had been smashed to scrap by Lee's artillery fire.

He held his guts in his hand as the charge came up to the wall

And his gun spoke out for him once before he fell to the ground.

Armistead leapt the wall and laid his hand on the gun,

The last of the three brigadiers who ordered Pickett's brigades,

He waved his hat on his sword and "Give 'em the steel!" he cried,

A few men followed him over.  The rest were beaten or dead.

A few men followed him over.  There had been fifteen thousand

When that sea began its march toward the fish-hook ridge and the

  wall.

So they came on in strength, light-footed, stepping like deer,

So they died or were taken.  So the iron entered their flesh.

Lee, a mile away, in the shade of a little wood,

Stared, with his mouth shut down, and saw them go and be slain,

And then saw for a single moment, the blue Virginia flag

Planted beyond the wall, by that other flag that he knew.

The two flags planted together, one instant, like hostile flowers.

Then the smoke wrapped both in a mantle--and when it had blown away,

Armistead lay in his blood, and the rest were dead or down,

And the valley grey with the fallen and the wreck of the broken wave.

Pickett gazed around him, the boy who had dreamt of a sword

And talked with a man named Lincoln.  The sword was still in his

  hand.

He had gone out with fifteen thousand.  He came back to his lines

  with five.

He fought well till the war was over, but a thing was cracked in his

  heart.