Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)

These lines juxtapose the rapid reversals of wartime feeling—enemies in the morning, reconciled by evening—with the blunt, leveling force of combat. The speaker suggests that in the immediacy of battle, abstract motives like personal fame or even patriotic ideals can recede, replaced by the soldier’s practical focus on survival and the shared human reality of danger. The parenthetical aside—“What like a bullet can undeceive!”—implies that violence strips away illusions and rhetoric, forcing a clear-eyed recognition of what war actually is. The tone is sardonic and disenchanted, characteristic of Melville’s Civil War verse, where moral complexity and irony often replace triumphalism.