Wave, wave your glorious battle-flags, brave soldiers of the North, And from the fields your arms have won to-day go proudly forth! For now, O comrades dear and leal--from whom no ills could part, Through the long years of hopes and fears, the nation’s constant heart-- Men who have driven so oft the foe, so oft have striven in vain, Yet ever in the perilous hour have crossed his path again,-- At last we have our heart’s desire, from them we met have wrung A victory that round the world shall long be told and sung! It was the memory of the past that bore us through the fray, That gave the grand old army strength to conquer on this day! Oh, now forget how dark and red Virginia’s rivers flow, The Rappahannock’s tangled wilds, the glory and the woe; The fever-hung encampments, where our dying knew full sore How sweet the north-wind to the cheek it soon shall cool no more; The fields we fought, and gained, and lost; the lowland sun and rain That wasted us, that bleached the bones of our unburied slain! There was no lack of foes to meet, of deaths to die no lack, And all the hawks of heaven learned to follow on our track; But henceforth, hovering southward, their flight shall mark afar The paths of yon retreating host that shun the northern star. At night before the closing fray, when all the front was still, We lay in bivouac along the cannon-crested hill. Ours was the dauntless Second Corps; and many a soldier knew How sped the fight, and sternly thought of what was yet to do. Guarding the centre there, we lay, and talked with bated breath Of Buford’s stand beyond the town, of gallant Reynolds’ death, Of cruel retreats through pent-up streets by murderous volleys swept,-- How well the Stone, the Iron, brigades their bloody outposts kept: ’Twas for the Union, for the Flag, they perished, heroes all, And we swore to conquer in the end, or even like them to fall. And passed from mouth to mouth the tale of what grim day just done, The fight by Round Top’s craggy spur--of all the deadliest one; It saved the left: but on the right they pressed us back too well, And like a field in spring the ground was ploughed with shot and shell. There was the ancient graveyard, its hummocks crushed and red. And there, between them, side by side, the wounded and the dead: The mangled corpses fallen above--the peaceful dead below, Laid in their graves, to slumber here, a score of years ago; It seemed their waking, wandering shades were asking of our slain, What brought such hideous tumult now where they so still had lain!