A Gettysburg War Ballad
At Gettysburg, a recruit hungry for glory bayonets a boy who has already raised his hands. The army gives him a medal; memory turns it into a wound he cannot outlive.
Read the complete lyrics ↓Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War: three days of fighting in July 1863 left roughly 50,000 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Its scale has often been reduced to maps, turning points, and the climactic failure of Pickett’s Charge. This ballad looks elsewhere—at the intimate violence hidden inside the victory lists.
The central killing is a fictional, composite episode rather than a claim about a named soldier or a documented moment of Pickett’s Charge. Gettysburg supplies the historical world; the song asks what happens when the heroic script survives in public after it has collapsed inside the person ordered to perform it.
The raised hands are unambiguous: the enemy boy has stopped fighting. The narrator, still possessed by his dream of becoming a man through violence, drives the bayonet in anyway and then begs the victim to die quickly enough to resemble the clean deaths promised by stories.
His comrades call him brave. A major pins on a medal and privately names the truth: “You killed that boy. Congratulations.” The final verses follow the veteran home, where official honor cannot contain moral injury. The medal is wrapped like a bone, worn like a wound, and the last gunshot is his own—not a triumph, but the final consequence of a glory the song has dismantled.
The night before the morning came
I polished up my blade
I saw my name in candlelight
where boys and heroes stayed
I dreamed I’d meet a roaring beast
with murder in his eyes
I dreamed I’d drive the steel in deep
and hear the colonel cry
“There stands a man among us now”
the banners would be raised
and every mouth around the fire
would learn to speak my name
Oh I was young
and hunger makes a crown
of any little shine
I thought the road to manhood
ran through another body’s spine
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
I thought a man was born that way
He raised his hands
I saw him pray
but glory had my wrist that day
He would not fall
like dreams fall down
he would not die like glory told him to
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
and all the world went blue
At dawn the drums were cracking hard
the smoke crawled on the field
the captain shouted “Forward, boys”
and no one thought to yield
Their line broke first, their colours dipped
their shouting turned to cries
some threw their rifles in the mud
some lifted empty palms
And there he stood before me then
too small inside his coat
with dirt across his frightened mouth
and terror in his throat
I had waited for a monster
with a sabre and a curse
but he looked almost like my brother
only standing on the other earth
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
I thought a man was born that way
He raised his hands
I saw him pray
but glory had my wrist that day
He would not fall
like dreams fall down
he would not die like glory told him to
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
and all the world went blue
The first thrust went below the ribs
I felt the cloth give way
his face was not a soldier’s face
it was a child’s dismay
Then red came black across his lips
he folded at the knees
he tried to speak, but only blood
came boiling through his teeth
I wanted him to disappear
to drop like stories do
but he kept breathing in the mud
and looking up at me
Die, die, die
I whispered like a prayer
Die, die, die
but God was not there
The blade went in
the blade came out
The drums went dumb
the field went loud
He would not die
he would not leave
He held the earth
he held my sleeve
By dusk the boys had heard of it
they grinned and passed it round
“You got one with the bayonet,
you put him in the ground”
They slapped my back, they called me brave
they said I’d earned my bread
I sat beside the cookfire
with my supper getting cold
The officers had seen enough
or heard enough by dawn
they passed me like a sickness
with their polished faces drawn
The major called me from the ranks
before the morning bread
the men stood proud around me
for the rumour they had fed
He pinned the medal to my coat
his fingers cold and tight
then leaned so only I could hear
the sentence of my life
“You killed that boy.
Congratulations.”
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
I thought a man was born that way
He raised his hands
I saw him pray
but glory had my wrist that day
He would not fall
like dreams fall down
he would not die like glory told him to
He raised his hands
I raised my blade
and all the world went blue
Years went by in Sunday clothes
the war was over in the books
but not beneath my floor
They called me veteran in town
they touched the medal’s face
I kept it wrapped in linen
like a bone I could not place
I thought a man was made by steel
I thought a name was won
I wore the medal like a wound
until I wore the gun
No cheer came through the bedroom wall
no trumpet answered me
The last shot sounded nothing like victory
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