Ballads of Bravery

Fastening the Buckle

 
STAND still, my steed, though the foe   is near,
And sharp the rattle of hoofs on the hill.
And see! there’s the glitter of many a spear,
And a wrathful shout that bodes us ill.
Stand still! Our way is weary and long,
And muscle and foot are put to the test.
Buckle and girth must be tightened and strong;
And rider and horse are far from rest.
 
 
A moment more, and then we’ll skim
Like a driving cloud o’er hill and plain;
The vision of horseman will slowly dim,
And pursuer seek the pursued in vain.
Ha! stirrup is strong and girth is tight!
One bound to the saddle, and off we go.
I count their spears as they glisten bright
In the ruddy beams of the sunset glow.
 
 
’Tis life or death; but we’re fresh and strong,
And buckle and girth are fastened tight.
The race is hard and the way is long,
But we’ll win as twilight fades into night.
Hurrah for rider and horse to-day,
For buckle and saddle fastened tight!
We’ll win! we’re gaining! They drop away!
Our haven of rest is full in sight.
 

Hervé Riel

 
ON the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two,
Did the English fight the French, – woe to France!
And the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter through the blue,
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue,
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Rance,
With the English fleet in view.
’Twas the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full chase,
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Damfreville.
Close on him fled, great and small,
Twenty-two good ships in all;
And they signalled to the place,
“Help the winners of a race!
Get us guidance, give us harbor, take us quick, – or, quicker still,
Here’s the English can and will!”
 
 
Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leaped on board.
“Why, what hope or chance have ships like these to pass?”
laughed they.
“Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage scarred
and scored,
Shall the Formidable here, with her twelve and eighty guns,
Think to make the river-mouth by the single narrow way,
Trust to enter where ’tis ticklish for a craft of twenty tons,
And with flow at full beside?
Now ’tis slackest ebb of tide.
Reach the mooring? Rather say,
While rock stands or water runs,
Not a ship will leave the bay!”
 
 
Then was called a council straight;
Brief and bitter the debate:
“Here’s the English at our heels; would you have them take in tow
All that’s left us of the fleet, linked together stern and bow,
For a prize to Plymouth Sound?
Better run the ships aground!”
(Ended Damfreville his speech.)
“Not a minute more to wait!
Let the captains all and each
Shove ashore, then blow up, burn the vessels on the beach!
France must undergo her fate.”
 
 
“Give the word!” But no such word
Was ever spoke or heard;
For up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid all these,
A captain? A lieutenant? A mate, – first, second, third?
No such man of mark, and meet
With his betters to compete,
But a simple Breton sailor, pressed by Tourville for the fleet, —
A poor coasting-pilot he, Hervé Riel, the Croisickese.
 
 
And “What mockery or malice have we here?” cries Hervé Riel.
“Are you mad, you Malouins? Are you cowards, fools, or rogues?
Talk to me of rocks and shoals, me who took the soundings, tell
On my fingers every bank, every shallow, every swell
’Twixt the offing here and Greve, where the river disembogues?
Are you bought by English gold? Is it love the lying’s for?
Morn and eve, night and day,
Have I piloted your bay,
Entered free and anchored fast at the foot of Solidor.
Burn the fleet, and ruin France? That were worse than
fifty Hogues!
Sirs, they know I speak the truth! Sirs, believe me, there’s a way!
Only let me lead the line,
Have the biggest ship to steer,
Get this Formidable clear,
Make the others follow mine,
And I lead them most and least by a passage I know well,
Right to Solidor, past Greve,
And there lay them safe and sound;
And if one ship misbehave,
Keel so much as grate the ground, —
Why, I’ve nothing but my life; here’s my head!” cries Hervé Riel.
 
 
Not a minute more to wait.
“Steer us in, then, small and great!
Take the helm, lead the line, save the squadron!” cried its chief.
“Captains, give the sailor place!”
He is admiral, in brief.
Still the north-wind, by God’s grace.
See the noble fellow’s face
As the big ship, with a bound,
Clears the entry like a hound,
Keeps the passage as its inch of way were the wide seas profound!
See, safe through shoal and rock,
How they follow in a flock.
Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates the ground,
Not a spar that comes to grief!
The peril, see, is past,
All are harbored to the last;
And just as Hervé Riel halloos, “Anchor!” – sure as fate,
Up the English come, too late.
 
 
So the storm subsides to calm;
They see the green trees wave
On the heights o’erlooking Greve.
Hearts that bled are stanched with balm.
“Just our rapture to enhance,
Let the English rake the bay,
Gnash their teeth and glare askance
As they cannonade away!
’Neath rampired Solidor pleasant riding on the Rance!”
How hope succeeds despair on each captain’s countenance!
Out burst all with one accord,
“This is Paradise for Hell!
Let France, let France’s king,
Thank the man that did the thing!”
What a shout, and all one word,
“Hervé Riel!”
As he stepped in front once more,
Not a symptom of surprise
In the frank blue Breton eyes,
Just the same man as before.
 
 
Then said Damfreville, “My friend,
I must speak out at the end,
Though I find the speaking hard:
Praise is deeper than the lips.
You have saved the king his ships,
You must name your own reward.
Faith, our sun was near eclipse!
Demand whate’er you will,
France remains your debtor still.
Ask to heart’s content, and have, or my name’s not Damfreville.”
Then a beam of fun outbroke
On the bearded mouth that spoke,
As the honest heart laughed through
Those frank eyes of Breton blue:
“Since I needs must say my say,
Since on board the duty’s done,
And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but a run?
Since ’tis ask and have I may,
Since the others go ashore, —
Come, a good whole holiday!
Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!”
That he asked, and that he got, – nothing more.
 
 
Name and deed alike are lost;
Not a pillar nor a post
In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell;
Not a head in white and black
On a single fishing-smack
In memory of the man but for whom had gone to rack
All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell.
Go to Paris; rank on rank
Search the heroes flung pell-mell
On the Louvre, face and flank,
You shall look long enough ere you come to Hervé Riel.
So, for better and for worse,
Hervé Riel, accept my verse!
In my verse, Hervé Riel, do thou once more
Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife, the Belle Aurore!
 

The Battle of Lexington

 
The circling century has brought
THE day on which our fathers fought
For liberty of deed and thought,
One hundred years ago!
We crown the day with radiant green,
And buds of hope to bloom between,
And stars undimmed, whose heavenly sheen
Lights all the world below.
 
 
At break of day again we hear
The ringing words of Paul Revere,
And beat of drum and bugle near,
And shots that shake the throne
Of tyranny, across the sea,
And wake the sons of Liberty
To strike for freedom and be free: —
Our king is God alone!
 
 
“Load well with powder and with ball,
Stand firmly, like a living wall;
But fire not till the foe shall call
A shot from every one,”
Said Parker to his gallant men.
Then Pitcairn dashed across the plain,
Discharged an angry threat, and then
The world heard Lexington!
 
 
Militia and brave minute-men
Stood side by side upon the plain,
Unsheltered in the storm of rain,
Of fire, and leaden sleet;
But through the gray smoke and the flame,
Star crowned, a white-winged angel came,
To bear aloft the souls of flame
From war’s red winding-sheet!
 
 
Hancock and Adams glory won
With yeomen whose best work was done
At Concord and at Lexington,
When first they struck the blow.
Long may their children’s children bear
Upon wide shoulders, fit to wear,
The mantles that fell through the air
One hundred years ago!
 

The Brave at Home

 
THE maid who binds her warrior’s sash,
With smile that well her pain dissembles,
The while beneath her drooping lash
One starry tear-drop hangs and trembles,
Though heaven alone records the tear,
And fame shall never know the story,
Her heart has shed a drop as dear
As e’er bedewed the field of glory.
 
 
The wife who girds her husband’s sword,
’Mid little ones who weep or wonder,
And bravely speaks the cheering word,
What though her heart be rent asunder,
Doomed nightly in her dreams to hear
The bolts of death around him rattle,
Hath shed as sacred blood as e’er
Was poured upon a field of battle!
 
 
The mother who conceals her grief,
While to her breast her son she presses,
Then breathes a few brave words and brief,
Kissing the patriot brow she blesses,
With no one but her secret God
To know the pain that weighs upon her,
Sheds holy blood as e’er the sod
Received on Freedom’s field of honor!
 

Kane: died February 16, 1857

 
ALOFT upon an old basaltic crag,
Which, scalped by keen winds that defend the Pole,
Gazes with dead face on the seas that roll
Around the secret of the mystic zone,
A mighty nation’s star-bespangled flag
Flutters alone;
And underneath, upon the lifeless front
Of that drear cliff, a simple name is traced, —
Fit type of him who, famishing and gaunt,
But with a rocky purpose in his soul,
Breasted the gathering snows,
Clung to the drifting floes,
By want beleaguered and by winter chased,
Seeking the brother lost amid that frozen waste.
 
 
Not many months ago we greeted him,
Crowned with the icy honors of the North.
Across the land his hard-won fame went forth,
And Maine’s deep woods were shaken limb by limb;
His own mild Keystone State, sedate and prim,
Burst from decorous quiet as he came;
Hot Southern lips, with eloquence aflame,
Sounded his triumph; Texas, wild and grim,
Proffered its horny hand; the large-lunged West,
From out his giant breast,
Yelled its frank welcome; and from main to main,
Jubilant to the sky,
Thundered the mighty cry,
Honor to Kane!
 
 
He needs no tears, who lived a noble life!
We will not weep for him who died so well,
But we will gather round the hearth and tell
The story of his strife.
Such homage suits him well, —
Better than funeral pomp or passing bell.
 
 
What tale of peril and self-sacrifice,
Prisoned amid the fastnesses of ice,
With hunger howling o’er the wastes of snow;
Night lengthening into months; the ravenous floe
Crunching the massive ships, as the white bear
Crunches his prey. The insufficient share
Of loathsome food;
The lethargy of famine; the despair
Urging to labor, nervelessly pursued;
Toil done with skinny arms, and faces hued
Like pallid masks, while dolefully behind
Glimmered the fading embers of a mind!
 
 
That awful hour, when through the prostrate band
Delirium stalked, laying his burning hand
Upon the ghastly foreheads of the crew;
The whispers of rebellion, faint and few
At first, but deepening ever till they grew
Into black thoughts of murder: such the throng
Of horrors bound the hero. High the song
Should be that hymns the noble part he played!
Sinking himself, yet ministering aid
To all around him. By a mighty will
Living defiant of the wants that kill,
Because his death would seal his comrades’ fate;
Cheering, with ceaseless and inventive skill,
Those Polar waters, dark and desolate.
Equal to every trial, every fate,
He stands, until spring, tardy with relief,
Unlocks the icy gate,
And the pale prisoners thread the world once more,
To the steep cliffs of Greenland’s pastoral shore,
Bearing their dying chief.
 
 
Time was when he should gain his spurs of gold
From royal hands, who wooed the knightly state.
The knell of old formalities is tolled,
And the world’s knights are now self-consecrate.
No grander episode doth chivalry hold
In all its annals, back to Charlemagne,
Than that lone vigil of unceasing pain,
Faithfully kept through hunger and through cold,
By the good Christian knight, Elisha Kane!