The Combat

Without a ripple stretched the plain;
For months we had not seen a hill;
The endless, hot savannah still
Fatigued the eye with waving cane.

A jungly forest lay before,
(The ambush of the wary foe);
In front, a stagnant sluice with low,
Reed-bordered, spongy, inky shore;

Along the right a mildewed swamp
Where alligators slept or crawled,
And pallid cypress-titans sprawled,
And mosses drooped their funeral pomp;

While leftward crept a dull lagoon,
As black as Charon's woful tide,
With plains beyond it blistering wide
Beneath the white-hot gleam of noon.

Gray, fitful spits of musketry
Announced our skirmishers at work;
We saw their darkling figures lurk
In thickets, firing from the knee.

Our cannon searched the distant wood
With humming, shrieking, cracking shell,
When suddenly the mouth of hell
Reclaimed its polyphemic food.

Menacing ghosts of whirling smoke
Arose a hundred yards ahead,
And deadly storms of hissing lead
From rifle-pit and canefield broke.

Then, while the bullets whistled shrill
And hidden batteries boomed and growled,
"Make ready! Aim!" the colonel howled;
"Battalion, forward! Fire at will!"

Right on against the foeman's wold,
With eager, gladsome, deafening fire
And whoops that keened each moment higher,
The dark-blue, living billow rolled.

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

I had no malice in my mind;
I only cried, "Close up! Guide right!"
My single purpose through the fight
Was quick advance with ranks aligned.

The foemen rose, then turned and fled;
A loosened, grey-clad multitude
Receded, vanished 'mid the wood,
And left us smiling o'er the dead.

Again the march, the endless plain,
The father-river hedged in dykes;
Gray cypresses, palmetto spikes,
Bayou and swamp and yellowing cane;

With rare plantations, richly spelled
In blooms, bananas, orange groves,
Where laugh the sauntering negro droves,
Reposing from the task of eld;

And, rarer, half-deserted towns,
Devoid of men, where women spit
Their helpless hate, and sidling flit
With writhing scowl and flouting gowns;

But everywhere, 'mid toils and scorns,
A noble sense of honor won,
A nobler sense of duty done,
A crown achieved, though sharp with thorns.