There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross, And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps, And behind that force another, fresh men who had not yet fought. They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.

From the hill they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave, A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky, And yet, as it came, still closing, closing and rolling on, As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left behind, Spilled from that deadly march as a cart spills meal on a road, And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more, And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.