A Psychological Weapon Poem by Peter Kane Dufault

I ventured it with the Old Gentleman once
not many Thanksgivings ago —
' The Gettysburgh Question'. I guess
sire and son were at sword's points yet,
that, as though for the fun's sake,
I could throw fifteen thousand banshee-
lunged Confederates at him — Hood's
Division of Longstreet's Corps.

A pandemonium of ghosts,
surely ... What was he, though,
at eighty-seven, but a gaunt and irascible
old spectre himself? ' Way back there, '
he used to tell us, ' Back there
when I was a little fella
could still walk under a horse,
the Troops on Memorial Day
wore blue . They were Union veterans,
men who'd fought at Antietam, Cold Harbor,
The Wilderness. . . . Farmers, most of 'em.
They worked too hard to get fat
and their uniforms still fit 'em.
They made a sight, I can tell you.
They knew how to march, those fellas.
Straight up. And proud. They'd licked Lee
and they looked ready to do it again, too.
Marching wasn't just holiday stuff either,
not in their day, y'understand. Men marched
under fire, elbow to elbow, lines
dressed on the guidons and drummers behind 'em.
Drummers! They kept in step, by God!
And that's how they went in —
into musketry or a cannonade.
No other way to mass your firepower
in those days but to mass your men.
And they died. God, they died.
A thousand men down at a volley. You wonder
any ever came back.

But these did, somehow. So us kids,
even if it was forty years later,
knew what real soldiers looked like. '
History
had most of him, all but this
deaf, trembling, papery remnant.
Even his own war — Wilson's War —
had been all bright brass and buffed leather
and salutes taken on horseback:
Post Adjutant he was then
at Fort Monroe in Virginia —
a coastal battery, ready

but never used — a museum, really,
of the old Regular Army: parades
and punctilio, shades
of General Winfield Scott and Old Dominion days.

When my own time came, I
with my grommetless ' fifty
mission crush ' in the cap
and two years overseas
was never a soldier to him.

Nor ever much of anything to him, having
a mystical turn of mind.
You could say I enjoyed being puzzled. —
(What's puzzlement, really, but
a degree of wonder? And what's wonder
again but a kind of psychedelic, a glimpse
of infinite possibilities?)

Nothing of that for him.
A puzzle calls for analysis,
analysis leads to decision,
and there it ends. A practical man:
Thirty years in big corporate management.
(And we'd fought there, too: myself
Jeffersonian, ul-
timately pastoral, I suppose;
and him Hamiltonian, northern,
pro-consul of industrial empire.)

But back of that, like a patent
of ancient and chivalric nobility,
loomed those two years at field grade
in the Old Regular Army. Nor
could he have forgotten it had he tried to,
for it seemed no one else could.
He remained ' The Major, ' from boardroom
to secretarial pool. And I recall him
still rasping into the hall phone
in his eighties, ' This is the Major. . . . ' So
I was calling his bluff, be-
latedly. (But what isn't
belated, in a demurral to History?) Yet
I was at once sorry I'd done it.
The cornered, outraged glare
he flashed at me silenced all tables —
four generations of us, none of whom
had come up with the answer. He was too deaf
to have heard the question till then,
and sat there, smiling at the pantomime.

I'd not grasped how little was left
of the old exec but his dignity,
and how I'd be challenging that,
taking the high ground of him
for an odd scrap of book-learning. . . . I'd
have backed out, had he not rebuked me:
' I'd need more information than that! ' he snapped.
' Decisions aren't made in a vacuum. '

I repeated the particulars:

Gettysburgh. Second day.
July 2, 1863...
The Twentieth Maine Infantry,
Col. Joshua Chamberlain, C.O.,
on a hill — ' Little Round Top ' : The regiment
has repulsed three successive attacks
from the right wing of Hood's Division.
A fourth assault is now massing
beyond the Devil's Den. The Twentieth Maine
stands unsupported, Col. Chamberlain
having been flank-marched abruptly here,
along with other elements of Skyes Fifth Corps
not yet in sight. Beyond those
in his own thinned ranks, not a blue blouse
can be seen, save far to the north
where regiment after blue regiment
stretches out along Meade's chosen line.

Rebel cannon on this hill
will enfilade the entire Army of the Potomac
and the battle be over before it starts. The odds,
even figuring those appalling windrows
of Brady corpses in the Devil's Den,
are still about five-to-one
against the Twentieth Maine.

Col. Chamberlain is now informed
his men are out of ammunition.
What does he do?

The Major frowned in silence a while,
then looked at me almost mildly.
' They attacked three times? '

' Three times. And forming up for the fourth. '
He scowled again, then suddenly struck the table.
' Fix bayonets! ' he croaked; then
in a full voice roared out, ' Charge! '

' Hey, Gramp, ' cried a grandson,
' That's the other side. What did our side do? '

' No! ' he shot back.
' I don't know what that fella did... '
He fixed me with his dim bristly gaze,
' But that's what he shoulda done! '
No doubt
my open-mouthed stare told him
he'd hit the answer. He sat back
with an air of grim satisfaction.
' Charge? '
someone whimpered in disbelief.
' Certainly.
The bayonet is a psychological weapon.
Damn few fellas ever got stuck with one. '

He turned to me again:
' The rebels broke, didn't they? '

I nodded.
' Of course they did.
What they'd been through, they'd've run
'f you'd sic'd a cross dog on 'em.
That's basic infantry tactics, or it was
in my day. Still is, I wouldn't wonder.
That fella made the correct decision.
No more, no less.
Nothing miraculous in it at all. . . . '

I can't say I was not proud
of the old martinet. . . . One of the kids
ran over and pumped his hand, crowing
' Gimme five, Gramp! You saved the Union! '

The Major did not smile.

He died not long after, at ninety,
and took History with him —
save for a sensation I get
at times when I think of him
that something in me will forever
be falling back toward the Potomac.