"--"Advance! The fight,--
How goes it, say?"--"We won the day!"--
"Huzza! Pass on!"--"Good-night!"--
And parts the darkness on before,
And down the mire we tramp,
And the black sky is painted o'er
With many a pulsing camp;
O'er stumps and ruts, by ruined huts,
Where ghosts look through the gloam,--
Behind my tread I hear the dead
Follow the news toward home!
The hunted souls I see behind,
In swamp and in ravine,
Whose cry for mercy thrills the wind
Till cracks the sure carbine;
The moving lights, which scare the dark,
And show the trampled place
Where, in his blood, some mother's bud
Turns up his young, dead face;
The captives spent, whose standards rent
The conqueror parades,
As at the Five Forks roads arrive
The General's dashing aides.
O wondrous Youth! through this grand ruth
Runs my boy's life its thread;
The General's fame, the battle's name,
The rolls of maimed and dead
I bear, with my thrilled soul astir,
And lonely thoughts and fears;
And am but History's courier
To bind the conquering years;
A battle-ray, through ages gray
To light to deeds sublime,
And flash the lustre of this day
Down all the aisles of Time!
Ho! pony,--'tis the signal gun
The night-assault decreed;
On Petersburg the thunderbolts
Crash from the lines of Meade;
Fade the pale, frightened stars o'erhead,
And shrieks the bursting air;
The forest foliage, tinted red,
Grows ghastlier in the glare;
Though in her towers, reached her last hours,
Rocks proud Rebellion's crest--
The world may sag, if but my nag
Get in before the rest!
With bloody flank, and fetlocks dank,
And goad, and lash, and shout--
Great God! as every hoof-beat falls
A hundred lives beat out!
As weary as this broken steed
Reels down the corduroys,
So, weary, fight for morning light
Our hot and grimy boys;
Through ditches wet, o'er parapet
And guns barbette, they catch
The last, lost breach; and I,--I reach
The mail with my despatch!
Sure it shall speed, the land to read,
As sped the happiest shell!
The shot I send strike the world's end;
_This_ tells my pony's knell;
His long race run, the long war done,
My occupation gone,--
Above his bier, prone on the pier,
The vultures fleck the dawn.
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