Part 2 (2/2)
As a man, the boy's memory did not tell him how the boys fared, but he does remember that it was dark in the timber where they camped that night, and that they slipped away into the woods to lie down together.
The chirping of the birds at dawn wakened them, and as John sat up rubbing his eyes, he heard a rifle's crack. They were at the edge of a field, and half a mile from him, troops were marching by columns across a clearing. The rifle-shot was followed by another, and another, and then by a half-dozen. ”Wake up, Bob--wake up--they's a battle,” he cried, and the two boys stumbled to their feet. The shots were far in front of the marching soldiers, and the boys could not make out what the firing meant. The line formed and ran up the hill, and the boys saw the morning sun flas.h.i.+ng on the guns of the enemy.
The battery roared, and the boys were filled with terror. They ran through the woods like dogs until they came to the soldiers from Sycamore Ridge. The boys crawled on their bellies to their friends, and lay with their faces all but buried in the ground. The men were lying at the edge of the timber talking, and Watts McHurdie was on his back.
”What's the matter with you, Watts?” asked Oscar Fernald.
”Os,” replied Watts, ”I got a presentiment I'm goin' to be shot in the rear. It will kill me to be shot in the back, and I've got a notion that's how I am goin' to die.”
The line laughed. Captain Ward, who was sitting a few paces in the rear of the men, went over to Watts, and scuffled the man over with his foot. A bullet went through Ward's hat before he got back to his place. The men were sticking up ramrods and betting on the number of minutes they would last. No ramrod stood more than ten minutes. Martin Culpepper threw up his hat five times before a bullet hit it; but he went bareheaded the rest of the day, and John Barclay, in sheer fear, began to dig a hole under him. After he had been on his belly for an hour, Henry Schnitzler got tired and rose. The men begged him to lie down. But his only reply when they told him he was a fool was, ”Vell, vot of it?” And when they said he would be shot, he answered again, ”Vell, vot of it?” And when Jake Dolan cried, ”You pot-gutted Dutchman, sit down or there'll be a sauer-kraut shower in h.e.l.l pretty quick,” Henry shook his fat sides a moment and laughed, ”Vell, vot of dot--altzo!” For an hour, that seemed ten, he moved back and forth on the line, firing and joking, and then the spell broke and a bullet took part of his jaw. As he dropped to his position, with the blood gus.h.i.+ng from his face, his eyes blazed, and he spat out, ”By h.e.l.l-tam, now I vos mad,” and he fought the day out and died that night. But as he sank to his place when the bullet hit him, Watts McHurdie saw Schnitzler stagger, and through the smoke, knew that he was wounded.
Watts rushed to Schnitzler and bent over him, when a ball hit Watts and went ripping through the fleshy part of his hip. ”Shot in the back--d.a.m.n it, shot in the back!” he screamed, as he jumped into the air. ”What did I tell you, boys, I'm shot in the back.” And he crawled bleeding to the rear.
All the long forenoon the camp of the enemy continued to belch out men. The battery mowed them down, and once the Kansans were ordered to charge the hill, and the boys were left alone. It was there that the two were separated. John saw men sink in awful silence, and the blood ooze from their heads. He saw men cramp in agony and choke with blood, and he saw Martin Culpepper, perhaps with the large white plumes still dancing in his eyes, dash out of the line and pick up a Union banner that Sigel's men had lost, and that the enemy was flaunting just before the artillery mowed the gray line down. He heard the hoa.r.s.e men cheer Martin, and as the tall swart figure came running back waving the flag, the boy prayed to his father's G.o.d to save the man.
When the battle lulled, the boy found himself parted from ”C” Company, and fled back through the woods to the rear. There he came upon a smell that was familiar. He had known it in the slaughter-house at home. It was the smell of fresh blood, and with it came the sickening drone of flies. In an instant he stood under a tree where men were working smeared with blood. He stumbled over a little pile of dismembered legs and hands. A man with a b.l.o.o.d.y knife was bending over a human form stretched on a b.l.o.o.d.y and, it seemed to the boy, a greasy table. Another was helping the big man. They were cutting the bullet out of Watts McHurdie, who was lying white and unconscious and with flies crawling over him, half naked and blood-smeared, on the table.
The boy screamed, and the man turned his head and snarled through his clenched teeth that held the knife, ”Get out of here--no--go get me a bucket of water from the creek.” Some one handed the boy a bucket, and he ran where he was told to go, with the awful sight burned on his brain, with the sickening smell in his nose, and with the drone of flies in his ears. When he came back the firing had begun again. The surgeon was saying, ”Well, that's all that's waiting--now I'm going for a minute.” He grabbed a gun standing by the table and ran toward the front; he did not take off his blood-splotched ap.r.o.n, and the boy fled from the place in terror. In a few moments the firing ceased; but the boy ran on, hunting for a hiding-place. He saw a troop of Alabamians plunge over a log in a charge, and roll in an awful, writhing, screaming pile of dying men and horses, and in the heap he saw the terror-stricken face of a youth, who was shrieking for help; John carried that fear-distorted face in his memory for years, until long afterwards it appeared in Sycamore Ridge.
But that day John fled from the death-trap almost mad with fear.
Rus.h.i.+ng farther into the woods, he came upon General Lyon and his staff. The plumed hats of the bodyguard told the boy that the sandy-haired man before him was in command, though the man's face was b.l.o.o.d.y from a wound in his head, and though his clothes were stained with blood and he was hatless. He sat upright on his horse, and as the boy turned, he heard the voices of Captain Ward and his soldiers, begging to be sent into the fight. It was a clamour fierce and piteous, and the general had turned his head to the Kansans, when something at the left startled him. There was no firing, and a column of soldiers was approaching. Doubt paralyzed the group around Lyon for a moment. The men wore gray blouses strangely like those the Iowans wore. The men might be Sigel's men, coming back from their artillery duel. The general plainly was puzzled. He rode out from the bodyguard a few paces. The boy was staring at him, when the bodyguard with their gay plumed hats came up, and he saw wrath flash into the general's face as he recognized the enemy. ”Shoot them--shoot them--” he shouted. But the gray line vomited its smoke first, and the boy felt his foot afire. The general dropped from his horse, and as the boy looked down, he saw a red blot coming out on his instep. In the same instant he saw Captain Ward rush to the falling general, and saw the bodyguard gather about him, and then the blackness came over the child and he fell. He did not see them bear General Lyon's body into the brush, nor hear Ward moan his sorrow. But when Ward returned from the thicket, he saw the child lying limp on the gra.s.s.
As Ward ran toward the hospital van carrying the limp little body, he could see that a ball had pierced the boy's foot. Also he saw the men in retreat who had shot Lyon, and all over the field the firing had ceased. As he hurried through the underbrush, Ward ran into Bob Hendricks hiding in the thicket. Ward took the child's hand and he began to sob: ”I saw Elmer go up that hill, Captain; I saw him go up with the horses and he ain't come back.” But Ward did not understand him, and hurried the little fellow along with John to the surgeon.
Then Ward left them, and when John Barclay opened his eyes, Bob Hendricks was sitting beside him. A great lint bandage was about John's foot, and they were in a wagon jolting over a rutty road. He did not speak for a long time, and then he asked, ”Did we whip 'em?”
And Bob nodded and said, ”Cap says so!”
The children clasped hands and talked of many things that pa.s.sed from the boy's mind. But his mind recorded that the next day in the hospital Martin Culpepper said, ”Bob can't come to-day, Johnnie; you know he's tendin' Elmer's funeral.” The boy must have opened his eyes, for the man said, ”Why, Johnnie, I thought you knew; yes; they found him dead that night--right under the reb--under the enemies' guns on the brink of the hill.”
The child's eyes filled with tears, but he did not cry. His emotion was spent. The two sat together for a time, and the little boy said, ”Why didn't you go, Mr. Culpepper?” And the man replied: ”Me?
Oh--why--Oh, yes, I got a little scratch here in my leg, and they won't let me out of here. There's Watts over there in the next cot; he got a little scratch too--didn't you, Watts?” Watts and the boy smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years. Miss Hendricks came and took him to their father's people in Ohio.
One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the third name the corporal called was ”Captain Martin Culpepper”; and when they brought him a long official envelope with General Fremont's name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the inscription, read the word ”captain” again and again, and could not speak for choked joy. And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not see the ”large white plumes” of chivalry, but the men in the beds cheered as they heard the words the corporal read.
With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white, and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do not smile in wonder; they show the visitors his shop, and point out the bowed little man bending over his bench, stretching his arms out as he sews, and they point him out with pride. Not even John Barclay with all his millions, or Bob Hendricks, who once refused a place in the President's cabinet, are more esteemed in Sycamore Ridge than the little harness maker who set the world to singing.
And curiously enough, John Barclay was with Watts McHurdie when he wrote the song. They brought him an accordion one day while he was getting well, and the two sat together. Watts droned along and shut his eyes and mumbled some words, and then burst out with the chorus.
Over and over he sang it and exclaimed between breaths: ”Say--ain't that fine? I just made it up.” He was exalted with his performance, and some women came loitering down the corridor where the wounded man and the boy were lying. The visitors gazed compa.s.sionately at them--little Watts not much larger than the boy. A woman asked, ”And where were you wounded, son?” looking at Watts with his accordion. His face flushed up at the thought of his shame, and he could not keep back the tears that always betrayed him when he was deeply moved.
”Ten--ten miles from Springfield, madam, ten miles from Springfield.”
And to hide his embarra.s.sment he began sawing at his accordion, chanting his famous song. But being only a little boy, John Barclay t.i.ttered.
A few days after the battle Captain Ward wrote to Miss Lucy telling her that some soldiers slightly wounded would go home on a furlough to Lawrence, and that they would take John with them and put him on the stage at Lawrence for Sycamore Ridge. Then Ward's letter continued: ”It is all so horrible--this curse of war; sometimes I think it is worse than the curse of slavery. There is no 'pomp and circ.u.mstance of glorious war.' Men died screaming in agony, or dumb with fear. They were covered with dirt, and when they were dead they merged into the landscape like inanimate things. What vital difference is there between a living man and a dead man, that one stands out in a scene big and obtrusive, and the other begins to fade into the earth as soon as death touches the body? The horror of death is upon me, and I cannot shake it off. It is a fearful thing to see a human soul pa.s.s 'in any shape, in any mood.' And I have seen so many deaths--we lost one man out of every three--that I am all unnerved. I saw General Lyon die--the only abolitionist in the regular army, they say. He died like a soldier--but not as the soldiers die in pictures. He sank off his horse so limp, and so like an animal with its death wound, and gasped so weakly, 'I'm killed--take care of my body,' that when we covered his face and bore him away, we could not realize we were carrying a man's body. And now, my dear, if I should go as these men go, I have neither kith nor kin to mourn me--only you, and you must not mourn, for I shall be near you always and always, without sign or token, and when you feel my presence near, know that it is real, and not a seeming. For the great force of life that moves events in this world has but one symbol, but one vital manifestation, and that is love, and when a soul is touched with that, it is immortal.”
But Martin Culpepper, with his dancing plumes, saw things in another light. Perhaps we always see things in another light when forty years have pa.s.sed over them. But in his chapter ”The Shrill Trump,” in the Biography, he writes: ”'O you mortal engines, whose rude throats the immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,' O for the 'spirit-stirring drum, and the ear-splitting fife' 'in these piping times of peace.'
Small wonder it was that with the clang and clank of sabre and artillery in his ears, with the huzzas of comrades and the sparkle of the wine of war in his eyes, our hero wrote the never dying words that made him famous. How the day comes back with all its pageantry, the caparisoned horses, the handsome men stepping to the music of inspiring melody, the clarion commands of the officers, and the steady rumble of a thousand feet upon the battle ground, going careless whether to death or immortality in deathless fame.”
A curious thing is that deathless fame which Martin speaks of--a pa.s.sing curious thing; for when word came of Henry Schnitzler's death, Mary Murphy, of the Thayer House, put off Gabriel Carnine's ring, and wept many tears in the stage driver's coffee and wore black in her hat for a year, and when Gabriel came home, she married him and all went as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the Carnines' first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war, she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman's heart, as the ”War widow by brevet.” Yet that was Henry's ”deathless fame” in Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier dead.
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