black hats tilted down
the rifle barrels sparkling
in the morning sun
As this brigade approached Gettysburg, Meredith or someone else ordered the flags uncased and set the fife-and-drum corps playing at the head of the column, and the Westerners fell into step and came swinging up the road, their black hats tilted down over their eyes, rifle barrels sparkling in the morning sun. There were eighteen hundred fighting men in this brigade, and the men were cocky. Officially they were the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the I Army Corps, and they figured that if the army were ever drawn up in one long line for inspection they would stand at the extreme right of it, which somehow was cause for pride. On the ridge to the west there was a crackle of small-arms fire and a steady crashing of cannon, with a long soiled cloud of smoke drifting up in the still morning air, and at the head of the column the drums and the fifes were loud—playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” probably, that perennial theme song of the Army of the Potomac, playing the Iron Brigade into its last great fight.
From The Army of the Potomac: Glory Road by Bruce Catton Doubleday & Company, New York, 1962
Like that master storyteller of Lincoln biography, Carl Sandburg, historian Bruce Catton passed his boyhood in a small Midwestern town, where he was entranced by the hypnotic yarns spun by elderly veterans of the Civil War. These men transfixed Catton, who listened as stories “out of the history books” came alive in the “flower-bed of Civil War veterans,” as he called his Northern Michigan home. Catton exulted: “They had been there”—and their reminiscences made him feel “as if the whole affair had taken place in the next county just a few years ago.” As a historian, Catton made his readers feel the same. Harold Holzer in the Wall Street Journal Book Reviews (Oct. 21, 2022).
No Haiku For You 