Si Klegg, Book 1: His Transformation from a Raw Recruit to a VeteranMcElroy, John
History
Si Klegg, Book 1: His Transformation from a Raw Recruit to a Veteran
McElroy, John
Indiana -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
and tossed and flung it back and forth from hill to hill and shore to
shore till it seemed as though Lee and his cohorts must have heard and
quailed before the fearful prophecy and arraignment.
Then the "tenore robusto" and the "basso profundo" opened a regular
concert program, more or less sprinkled with magnificent chorus:
singing, as it was easy or difficult for the men to recall the words.
You must rummage in the closets of memory for most of them! The Old
Oaken Bucket; Nellie Gray; Anna Lisle; No, Ne'er Can Thy Home be Mine;
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp; We are Coming, Father Abraham; Just as I Am; By
Cold Siloam's Shady Rill--how those home-loving Sunday school young
boys did sing that! It seemed incongruous, but every now and then they
dropped into these old hymn tunes, which many a mother had sung her baby
to sleep with in those elder and better days.
The war songs are all frazzled and torn fragments of memory now, covered
with dust and oblivion, but they were great songs in and for their day.
No other country ever had so many.
Laughter and badinage had long since ceased. Flat on their backs,
gazing up at the stars through the pine and hemlock boughs, the boys
lay quietly smoking while the "tenore robusto" assisted by the "basso
profundo" and hundreds of others sang "Willie, We Have Missed You,"
"Just Before the Battle, Mother," "Brave Boys Are They," and the "Vacant
Chair."
In a little break in the singing. Hen Withers sang a wonderful song, now
almost forgotten. It was new to the boys then, but the bugler had heard
it, and as Hen's magnificent voice rolled forth its fervid words the
bugle caught up the high note theme, and never did the stars sing
together more entrancingly than did the "wicked mule whacker" and that
bugle--
"Lift up your eyes, desponding freemen.
Fling to the winds your needless fears.
He who unfurled our beauteous banner
Says it shall wave a thousand years."
On the glorious chorus a thousand voices took up the refrain in droning
fashion that made one think of "The Sound of the Great Amen."
"A thousand years, my own Columbia!
Tis the glad day so long foretold!
'Tis the glad mom whose early twilight
Washington saw in times of old."
By the time Hen had sung all of the seven verses the whole brigade
knew the refrain and roared it forth as a defiance to the Southern
Confederacy, which took on physical vigor in the days that came after,
when the 200th Ind. went into battle to come off victorious on many a
fiercely contested field.
Then the tenor sang that doleful, woe begone, hope effacing,
heart-string-cracking "Lorena." Some writer has said that it sung the
heart right out of the Southern Confederacy.
"The sun's low down the sky, Lorena,
The snow is on the grass again."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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