And that witches of ruin haunt each move he makes. But even so⁠—he has boarded that jutting deck That is the Peninsula, and his forces creep Slowly toward Richmond, slowly up to the high Defended captain’s cabin of the great ship. —There was another force that came from its ships To take a city set on a deck of land, The cause unlike, but the fighting no more stark, The doom no fiercer, the fame no harder to win. There are no gods to come with a golden smoke Here in the mud between the York and the James And wrap some high-chinned hero away from death. There are only Bibles and buckles and cartridge belts That sometimes stop a bullet before it kills But oftener let it pass. And when Sarpedon Falls and the heavy darkness stiffens his limbs They will let him lie where he fell, they will not wash him In the running streams of Scamander, the half-divine, They will bury him in a shallow and cumbered pit. But, if you would sing of fighters, sing of these men, Sing of Fair Oaks and the battered Seven Days, Not of the raging of Ajax, the cry of Hector,