The words of a rebel old and battered,
Who will care to remember them?
Under the Lost Flag, battle-tattered,
I was a comrade of Allan Memm.
Who was Allan, that I should name him
Bravest of all the brave who bled?
Why should a soldier’s song proclaim him
First of a hundred thousand dead?
An angel of battle, with fair hair curling
By brown cheeks shrunken and wan with want;
A living missile that Lee was hurling
Straight on the iron front of Grant;
A war-child born of the Old South’s passion,
Trained in the camp of the cavaliers;
A spirit wrought in the antique fashion
Of Glory’s martial morning years.
His young wife’s laugh and his baby’s prattle
He bore through the roar of the hungry guns--
Through the yell of shell in the rage of battle,
And the moan that under the thunder runs.
His was the voice that cried the warning
At the shattered gate of the slaughter-pen,
When Hancock rushed in the gray of morning
Over our doomed and desperate men.
His was the hand that held the standard--
A flaring torch on a crumbling shore--
’Mid the billows of blue by the storm blown landward,
And his call we heard through the ocean roar:
Ere the flag should shrink to a lost hope’s token,
Ere the glow of its glory be low and dim,
Ere its stars should fade and its bars be broken,
Calling his comrades to come to him.
And these, at the order of Hill or Gordon,--
God keep their ashes! I knew them well,--
Would have smashed the ranks of the devil’s cordon,
Or charged through the flames that roar in hell.
But none could stand where the storm was beating,
Never a comrade could reach his side;
In the spume of flame where the tides were meeting,
He, of a thousand, stood and died.
And the foe, in the old heroic manner,
Tenderly laid his form to rest,
The splintered staff and the riddled banner
Hiding the horror upon his breast.
* * * * *
Gone is the cot in the Georgia wildwood,
Gone is the blossom-strangled porch;
The roof that sheltered a soldier’s childhood
Vainly pleaded with Sherman’s torch.
Gone are the years, and far and feeble
Ever the old wild echoes die;
Hark to the voice of a great, glad people
Hailing the one flag under the sky!
And the monstrous heart of the storm receding
Fainter and farther throbs and jars;
And the new storm bursts, and the brave are bleeding
Under the cruel alien stars.
And Allan’s wife in the grave is lying
Under the old scorched vine and pine,
While Allan’s child in the isles is dying
Far on the foremost fighting line.
Cheer for the flag with the old stars spangled!
Shake out its folds to the wind’s caress,
Over the hearts by the war-hounds mangled,
Down in the tangled Wilderness!
To wave o’er the grave of the brave forever;
For the Gray has sealed, in the bond of blood,
His faith to the Blue, and the brave shall never
Question the brave in the sight of God.