The Glorious Ninth

"Reveille: A story about survival, war, family" is an historical fiction novel about Charles Montgomery Andres and his life as a New Orleans orphan, a drummer boy for the Ninth Connecticut Regiment during the Civil War, and his travels after the war looking for ... family.

Hopefully, the novel will be published in 2009. In tribute to the regiment, my son Dr. C. Jason Smith and I wrote the following poem, which is included in the manuscript.

The Glorious Ninth

By George S. Smith
And C. Jason Smith, PhD
Great-grandson and great-great grandson of Charles Andre (Andres)
Drummer boy for Companies H and C, Ninth Connecticut-1863-1865

Today we call them heroes,
that band of men and boys.
They gave up lives they knew
for a war they did not yet know.

The men of the Ninth Connecticut:
adventurers, bounty-men,
husbands, brothers, and sons:
some were running away,
some were running to believe,
some just went to see.
They are all patriots in the end.
who marched to the drum beat
of their impetuous, broken nation,
two sides, out of step, out of spite, out of pride.

The Irish Regiment, they were,
although by that name others were known.
But here: red-headed boys rubbed shoulders,
shared tents and pots and pans and spoons
with tow-headed boys and dusky, harder men
whose fathers bore the yoke,
with men raised on bacon and grits
who scanned enemy lines for cousins,
uncles, and brothers.
They were all searching for justice,
perhaps, or, maybe,
simply looking for a home.

They all sought a reason
For the unreasonable times.
Together, they cleaned guns, boiled beans,
peeled wild onions, broke hardtack,
built campfires and fought like banshees
when called up to do so.
Believers and not,
this gathering of brothers,
working, living, fighting, dying
beside one another
at a time when Truth
could wait for History.

These ancestors made room
for us to be proud.
They fought at Vicksburg, Baton Rouge,
Winchester, Fisher's Hill, Cedar Creek,
and other, less recognizable battles of man.
They fought for freedom
because freedom sometimes means
you have to give it up.
You will find their mark still
on places high and low,
in history, on paper,
in remembrance, and in rumor.
Their bones fertilize this very ground.

They left their blood, their youth,
their farms and loves and dreams
on hundreds of hills and fields
from the swamps of Louisiana
to the rolling hills of the Shenandoah,
building a legacy forged from
faith, determination, necessity,
inner strength, courage,
and, finally, brotherhood.

We honor them now
just as they honored themselves
with difficult, faithful service
those long years ago,
when this nation was still enduring
the horrible pains of growing.

These heroes didn't think
of themselves as heroes.
Heroes never do.
They were just soldiers
doing what they came to do.

They did it well.