Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/64

IN WAR TIME What a leader he would make

Where the battle's topmost billows break!

The crimes which brought our land to ruth,

How in his soul they would have wrought!

God help me, no deed of mine shall shame

The honor of my grandsire's name;

And my father shall see how pure and good

Runs in these veins the olden blood."

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Shore and inland their men have sent:

Away, to the mountain regiment,

The silver-hazed Potomac heights,

The circling raids, the hundred fights,

The booth, the bivouac, the tent.

Away, from the happy Monmouth farms,

To noontide marches, night alarms,

Death in the shadowy oaken glades,

Emptied saddles, broken blades,—

All the turmoil that soldiers know

Who gallop to meet a mortal foe,

Some to conquer, some to fall:

War hath its chances for one and all.

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Heroes, who render up their lives

On the country's fiery altar-stone—

They do not offer themselves alone.

What shall become of the soldiers' wives?

They stay behind in the lonely cots,

Weeding the humble garden-plots;

Some to speed the needle and thread,

For the soldiers' children must be fed;

All to sigh, through the toilsome day,

And at night teach lisping lips to pray

For the fathers marching far away.

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