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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=521176" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Army Of Northern Virginia</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Army of Northern Virginia, army of legend,<br>Who were your captains that you could trust them so surely? <br>Who were your battle-flags?<br>Call the shapes from the mist, <br>Call the dead men out of the mist and watch them ride. <br>Tall the first rider, tall with a laughing mouth, <br>His long black beard is combed like a beauty's hair, <br>His slouch hat plumed with a curled black ostrich-feather,<br>He wears gold spurs and sits his horse with the seat <br>Of a horseman born.<br>It is Stuart of Laurel Hill, <br>'Beauty' Stuart, the genius of cavalry,<br>Reckless, merry, religious, theatrical, <br>Lover of gesture, lover of panache, <br>With all the actor's grace and the quick, light charm <br>That makes the women adore him-a wild cavalier<br>Who worships as sober a God as Stonewall Jackson,<br>A Rupert who seldom drinks, very often prays,<br>Loves his children, singing, fighting spurs, and his wife. <br>Sweeney his banjo-player follows him.<br>And after them troop the young Virginia counties,<br>Horses and men, Botetort, Halifax, <br>Dinwiddie, Prince Edward, Cumberland, Nottoway,<br>Mecklenburg, Berkeley, Augusta, the Marylanders,<br>The horsemen never matched till Sheridan came.<br>Now the phantom guns creak by. They are Pelham's guns. <br>That quiet boy with the veteran mouth is Pelham.<br>He is twenty-two. He is to fight sixty battles <br>And never lose a gun.<br>The cannon roll past,<br>The endless lines of the infantry begin.<br>A. P. Hill leads the van. He is small and spare,<br>His short, clipped beard is red as his battleshirt,<br>Jackson and Lee are to call him in their death-hours.<br>Dutch Longstreet follows, slow, pugnacious and stubborn,<br>Hard to beat and just as hard to convince,<br>Fine corps commander, good bulldog for holding on,<br>But dangerous when he tries to think for himself,<br>He thinks for himself too much at Gettysburg,<br>But before and after he grips with tenacious jaws.<br>There is D. H. Hill-there is Early and Fitzhugh Lee-<br>Yellow-haired Hood with his wounds and his empty sleeve,<br>Leading his Texans, a Viking shape of a man, <br>With the thrust and lack of craft of a berserk sword,<br>All lion, none of the fox.<br>When he supersedes <br>Joe Johnston, he is lost, and his army with him,<br>But he could lead forlorn hopes with the ghost of Ney. <br>His bigboned Texans follow him into the mist. <br>Who follows them?<br>These are the Virginia faces, <br>The Virginia speech. It is Jackson's footcavalry,<br>The Army of the Valley, <br>It is the Stonewall Brigade, it is the streams <br>Of the Shenandoah, marching.<br>Ewell goes by,<br>The little woodpecker, bald and quaint of speech<br>With his wooden leg stuck stiffly out from his saddle,<br>He is muttering, 'Sir, I'm a nervous Major-General,<br>And whenever an aide rides up from General Jackson<br>I fully expect an order to storm the North Pole.'<br>He chuckles and passes, full of crotchets and courage,<br>Living on frumenty for imagined dyspepsia, <br>And ready to storm the North Pole at a Jackson phrase.<br>Then the staff-then little Sorrel-and the plain <br>Presbyterian figure in the flat cap, <br>Throwing his left hand out in the awkward gesture<br>That caught the bullet out of the air at Bull Run,<br>Awkward, rugged and dour, the belated Ironside <br>With the curious, brilliant streak of the cavalier<br>That made him quote Mercutio in staff instructions,<br>Love lancet windows, the color of passion-flowers,<br>Mexican sun and all fierce, tautlooking fine creatures;<br>Stonewall Jackson, wrapped in his beard and his silence,<br>Cromwell-eyed and ready with Cromwell's short<br>Bleak remedy for doubters and fools and enemies,<br>Hard on his followers, harder on his foes, <br>An iron sabre vowed to an iron Lord, <br>And yet the only man of those men who pass <br>With a strange, secretive grain of harsh poetry <br>Hidden so deep in the stony sides of his heart <br>That it shines by flashes only and then is gone.<br>It glitters in his last words.<br>He is deeply ambitious,<br>The skilled man, utterly sure of his own skill <br>And taking no nonsense about it from the unskilled,<br>But God is the giver of victory and defeat, <br>And Lee, on earth, vicegerent under the Lord. <br>Sometimes he differs about the mortal plans <br>But once the order is given, it is obeyed. <br>We know what he thought about God. One would like to know <br>What he thought of the two together, if he so mingled them. <br>He said two things about Lee it is well to recall.<br>When he first beheld the man that he served so well,<br>'I have never seen such a fine-looking human creature.'<br>Then, afterwards, at the height of his own fame,<br>The skilled man talking of skill, and something more.<br>'General Lee is a phenomenon, <br>He is the only man I would follow blindfold.'<br>Think of those two remarks and the man who made them<br>When you picture Lee as the rigid image in marble.<br>No man ever knew his own skill better than Jackson<br>Or was more ready to shatter an empty fame. <br>He passes now in his dusty uniform. <br>The Bible jostles a book of Napoleon's Maxims <br>And a magic lemon deep in his saddlebags.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now at last, <br>Comes Traveller and his master. Look at them well.<br>The horse is an iron-grey, sixteen hands high,<br>Short back, deep chest, strong haunch, flat legs, small head,<br>Delicate ear, quick eye, black mane and tail, <br>Wise brain, obedient mouth.<br>Such horses are <br>The jewels of the horseman's hands and thighs, <br>They go by the word and hardly need the rein. <br>They bred such horses in Virginia then,<br>Horses that were remembered after death <br>And buried not so far from Christian ground <br>That if their sleeping riders should arise <br>They could not witch them from the earth again <br>And ride a printless course along the grass <br>With the old manage and light ease of hand. <br>The rider, now.<br>He too, is iron-grey,<br>Though the thick hair and thick, blunt-pointed beard<br>Have frost in them.<br>Broad-foreheaded, deep-eyed,<br>Straight-nosed, sweet-mouthed, firmlipped, head cleanly set,<br>He and his horse are matches for the strong<br>Grace of proportion that inhabits both.<br>They carry nothing that is in excess<br>And nothing that is less than symmetry,<br>The strength of Jackson is a hammered strength,<br>Bearing the tool marks still. This strength was shaped<br>By as hard arts but does not show the toil<br>Except as justness, though the toil was there.<br>-And so we get the marble man again,<br>The head on the Greek coin, the idol image,<br>The shape who stands at Washington's left hand,<br>Worshipped, uncomprehended and aloof,<br>A figure lost to flesh and blood and bones,<br>Frozen into a legend out of life,<br>A blank-verse statue-<br>How to humanize <br>That solitary gentleness and strength <br>Hidden behind the deadly oratory <br>Of twenty thousand Lee Memorial days, <br>How show, in spite of all the rhetoric, <br>All the sick honey of the speechifiers,<br>Proportion, not as something calm congealed <br>From lack of fire, but ruling such a fire <br>As only such proportion could contain?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The man was loved, the man was idolized,<br>The man had every just and noble gift.<br>He took great burdens and he bore them well,<br>Believed in God but did not preach too much,<br>Believed and followed duty first and last<br>With marvellous consistency and force,<br>Was a great victor, in defeat as great,<br>No more, no less, always himself in both,<br>Could make men die for him but saved his men<br>Whenever he could save them-was most kind<br>But-was not disobeyed-was a good father,<br>A loving husband, a considerate friend:<br>Had litle humor, but enough to play<br>Mild jokes that never wounded but had charm,<br>Did not seek intimates, yet drew men to him, <br>Did not seek fame, did not protest against it, <br>Knew his own value without pomp or jealousy <br>And died as he preferred to live-sans praise, <br>With commonsense, tenacity and courage, <br>A Greek proportion-and a riddle unread. <br>And everything that we have said is true <br>And nothing helps us yet to read the man, <br>Nor will he help us while he has the strength <br>To keep his heart his own.<br>For he will smile <br>And give you, with unflinching courtesy, <br>Prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders,<br>Photographs, kindness, valor and advice, <br>And do it with such grace and gentleness <br>That you will know you have the whole of him <br>Pinned down, mapped out, easy to understand- <br>And so you have.<br>All things except the heart <br>The heart he kept himself, that answers all. <br>For here was someone who lived all his life <br>In the most fierce and open light of the sun, <br>Wrote letters freely, did not guard his speech, <br>Listened and talked with every sort of man, <br>And kept his heart a secret to the end <br>From all the picklocks of biographers.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He was a man, and as a man he knew <br>Love, separation, sorrow, joy and death. <br>He was a master of the tricks of war, <br>He gave great strokes and warded strokes as great.<br>He was the prop and pillar of a State, <br>The incarnation of a national dream, <br>And when the State fell and the dream dissolved <br>He must have lived with bitterness itself- <br>But what his sorrow was and what his joy, <br>And how he felt in the expense of strength, <br>And how his heart contained its bitterness, <br>He will not tell us.<br>We can lie about him,<br>Dress up a dummy in his uniform<br>And put our words into the dummy's mouth,<br>Say 'Here Lee must have thought,' and 'There, no doubt, <br>By what we know of him, we may suppose <br>He felt-this pang or that-' but he remains <br>Beyond our stagecraft, reticent as ice, <br>Reticent as the fire within the stone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet-look at the face again-look at it well- <br>This man was not repose, this man was act. <br>This man who murmured 'It is well that war <br>Should be so terrible, if it were not <br>We might become too fond of it-' and showed <br>Himself, for once, completely as he lived <br>In the laconic balance of that phrase; <br>This man could reason, but he was a fighter, <br>Skilful in every weapon of defence <br>But never defending when he could assault, <br>Taking enormous risks again and again, <br>Never retreating while he still could strike, <br>Dividing a weak force on dangerous ground <br>And joining it again to beat a strong, <br>Mocking at chance and all the odds of war <br>With acts that looked like hairbread'th recklessness -<br>We do not call them reckless, since they won. <br>We do not see him reckless for the calm <br>Proportion that controlled the recklessness- <br>But that attacking quality was there. <br>He was not mild with life or drugged with justice, <br>He gripped life like a wrestler with a bull, <br>Impetuously. It did not come to him <br>While he stood waiting in a famous cloud, <br>He went to it and took it by both horns <br>And threw it down.<br>Oh, he could bear the shifts <br>Of time and play the bitter loser's game, <br>The slow, unflinching chess of fortitude, <br>But while he had an opening for attack <br>He would attack with every ounce of strength. <br>His heart was not a stone but trumpet-shaped <br>And a long challenge blew an anger through it <br>That was more dread for being musical <br>First, last, and to the end.<br>Again he said<br>A curious thing to life. <br>'I'm always wanting something.'<br>The brief phrase<br>Slides past us, hardly grasped in the smooth flow<br>Of the well-balanced, mildly-humorous prose<br>That goes along to talk of cats and duties, <br>Maxims of conduct, farming and poor bachelors, <br>But for a second there, the marble cracked <br>And a strange man we never saw before <br>Showed us the face he never showed the world <br>And wanted something-not the general <br>Who wanted shoes and food for ragged men, <br>Not the good father wanting for his children, <br>The patriot wanting victory-all the Lees <br>Whom all the world could see and recognize <br>And hang with gilded laurels-but the man <br>Who had, you'd say, all things that life can give<br>Except the last success-and had, for that, <br>Such glamor as can wear sheer triumph out, <br>Proportion's son and Duty's eldest sword <br>And the calm mask who-wanted something still, <br>Somewhere, somehow and always.<br>Picklock biographers,<br>What could he want that he had never had?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He only said it once-the marble closed- <br>There was a man enclosed within that image. <br>There was a force that tried Proportion's rule <br>And died without a legend or a cue <br>To bring it back. The shadow-Lees still live.<br>But the first-person and the singular Lee?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground <br>But earth's too small for something in our earth,<br>We'll make a new earth from the summer's cloud, <br>From the pure summer's cloud.<br>It was not that, <br>It was not God or love or mortal fame. <br>It was not anything he left undone. <br>-What does Proportion want that it can lack? <br>-What does the ultimate hunger of the flesh <br>Want from the sky more than a sky of air?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He wanted something. That must be enough.<br>Now he rides Traveller back into the mist.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Stephen+Vincent+Benet">Stephen Vincent Benet</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=521176" data-title="Army Of Northern Virginia de Stephen Vincent Benet" data-description="Army of Northern Virginia, army of legend,
Who were your captains that you could trust them so surely? 
Who were your battle-flags?
Call the shapes from the mist, 
Call the dead men out of the mist and watch them ride. 
Tall the first rider, tall ..."></div>
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