United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction; War stories
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."
As Wilse Hornbeck let his splendid voice out on the mournful cadences,
Si felt his very heart strings snap, and even Shorty drew his breath
hard, while some of the men simply rolled over, and burying their faces
in their arms, sobbed audibly.
Wilse had not counted on losing his own nerve, but found his voice
breaking on the melancholy last lines, and bounding to his feet with a
petulant,
"Oh, hang it!"
"Say, darkies, hab you seen de Massa"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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