Part 21 (1/2)

With the closing in of the ghostly day, in a stretch of fields beside a frozen stream, the column halted. There were no tents, and there was scarcely anything to eat. One of the fields was covered by stacked corn, and it was discovered that the ear had been left. In the driving sleet the men tore apart the shocks and with numbed fingers stripped from the grain the sere, rough, and icy husks. They and the horses ate the yellow corn. All night, stupid with misery, the soldiers dozed and muttered beside the wretched fires. One, a lawyer's clerk, cried like a child, with his hands scored till they bled by the frozen corn husks. Down the stream stood a deserted sawmill, and here the Rockbridge men found planks with which they made for themselves little pens. The sleet sounded for hours on the boards that served for roof, but at last it died away. The exhausted army slept, but when in the grey dawn it stirred and rose to the wailing of the bugles, it threw off a weight of snow. All the world was white again beneath a livid sky.

This day they made four miles. The grey trees were draped with ice, the grey zigzag of the fences was gliding ice under the hands that caught at it, the hands of the sick and weak. Motion resolved itself into a Dead March; few notes and slow, with rests. The army moved and halted, moved and halted with a weird stateliness. Couriers came back from the man riding ahead, cadet cap drawn over eyes that saw only what a giant and iron race might do under a giant and iron dictators.h.i.+p. General Jackson says, ”Press Forward!” General Jackson says, ”Press Forward, men!”

They did not reach Bath that night. They lay down and slept behind a screen of hills and awoke in an amethyst dawn to a sky of promise. The light, streaming from the east, made glorious the ice-laden trees and the far and dazzling wastes of snow. The suns.h.i.+ne cheered the troops.

Bath was just ahead--Bath and the Yankees! The 1st Tennessee and the 48th Virginia suddenly swung from the main road, and moved across the fields to the ridges overlooking the town. Apparently they had gathered their strength into a ball, for they went with energy, double-quickening over the snow. The afternoon before Carson and Meems had been detached, disappearing to the right. A rumour ran through the ranks. This force would be now on the other side of Bath. ”It's like a cup, all of us on the rim, and the Yanks at the bottom. If Carson can hold the roads on the other side we've got them, just like so many coffee grounds! Fifteen hundred of them in blue, and two guns?--Boys, I feel better!”

Old Jack--the men began with suddenness again to call him Old Jack--Old Jack divulged nothing. Information, if information it was, came from scouts, couriers, Ashby's vedettes, chance-met men and women of the region. Something electric flashed from van to rear. The line went up the hill with rapidity. When they reached the crest the men saw the cavalry far before and below them, charging upon the town and shouting.

After the horse came a body of skirmishers, then, pouring down the hillside the 1st Tennessee and the 48th Virginia, yelling as they ran.

From the town burst a loud rattle of musketry, and from a height beyond a cannon thundered. All the white sides of the cup echoed the sound.

The infantry swerved to let the artillery by. The guns, grim beneath their ice coats, the yelling men, the drivers loudly encouraging the horses, the horses, red-nostrilled, wide-eyed--all came somehow, helter-skelter down the long windings of the ridge. The infantry followed; the town was entered; the Federals retreated, firing as they went, streaming out by two roads. One led toward Sir John's Run, the other direct to the Potomac with Hanc.o.c.k on the Maryland sh.o.r.e, and at Hanc.o.c.k General Lander with a considerable force. Carson's men, alack!

had found the winter hills no bagatelle. They were not in time to secure the roads.

The Confederate cavalry, dividing, followed, full tilt, the retreating foe. A courier brought back to the artillery a curt order from Jackson to push on by the Hanc.o.c.k road. As he turned, his mare slipped, and the two came cras.h.i.+ng down upon the icy road. When they had struggled up and out of the way the batteries pa.s.sed rumbling through the town. Old men and boys were out upon the trampled sidewalks, and at window and door women and children waved handkerchiefs, clapped hands. At a corner, in the middle of the street, lay a horse, just lifeless, covered with blood. The sight maddened the battery horses. They reared and plunged, but at last went trembling by. From the patriarchs and the eager boys came information. The Yankees were gone, but not their baggage and stores. Everything had been left behind. There were army blankets, tents, oilcloths, clothing, _shoes_, cords of firewood, forage for the horses, flour, and fresh meat, sugar, coffee, sutlers' stores of every kind, wines, spirits, cigars--oh, everything! The artillery groaned and swore, but obeyed orders. Leaving Capua behind, it strained along the Hanc.o.c.k road in the wake of the pursuing cavalry and the fleeing Federals.

The main body of the latter, well in advance and with no exhausting march behind them to weaken horse and man, reached the Potomac by the Hanc.o.c.k road at a point where they had boats moored, and got clean away, joining Lander on the Maryland sh.o.r.e. The lesser number, making for Sir John's Run and the Big Cacapon and followed by some companies of Ashby's, did not so quickly escape. The Confederate advance came, artillery, horse, and skirmishers, upon the river bank at sunset. All around were great rolling hills, quite bare of trees and covered with snow, over which the setting sun threw a crimson tinge. Below was the river, hoa.r.s.ely murmuring, and immediately upon the other side, the cl.u.s.tering Maryland village, with a church spire tall and tapering against the northern sky. About the village was another village of tents, and upon a hilltop frowned a line of guns. Dusk as it was, the Confederate batteries unlimbered, and there opened an artillery duel, sh.e.l.ls screaming from north to south and south to north across the river yet stained with the sunset glow.

That night the infantry remained at Bath, warmed and comforted by the captured stores. They came like a gift from the G.o.ds, and as is usual with that gift they disappeared in a twinkling. In the afternoon the three arms met on the river bank. The sky was again a level grey; it was evident that a snowstorm was brewing. There was not a house; except for the fringe along the water's edge there was hardly a tree. The hills were all bare. The snow was packed so hard and so mingled with ice that when, in the cannonading, the Federal missiles struck and tore it up the fragments were as keen and troublesome, almost, as splinters of sh.e.l.l.

There was no shelter, little wood for burning. The men gazed about them with a frown of uneasiness. The storm set in with a whirl of snow and with a wind that raved like a madman and broke the spectral white arms of the sycamores by the river. In a short time there was a s.h.i.+fting, wonderful, numbing veil streaming silent from the grey heavens. It was almost a relief when dark came and wrapped the great, lonely, ghostly countryside. This night the men disregarded the taboo and burned every available fence rail.

In the morning a boat was put across the half-frozen river. It bore a summons to Lander to surrender, the alternative being a bombardment of the town. ”Retaliation for Shepherdstown” read Jackson's missive. Ashby bore the summons and was led blindfold through the streets to headquarters. Lander, looking momently for reinforcements from Williamsport, declined to surrender. Ashby pa.s.sed blindfolded out of the town, entered the boat, and came back to Stonewall Jackson. The latter waited two hours, then began to throw sh.e.l.ls into the town. Since early morning a force had been engaged in constructing, two miles up the river, a rude bridge by which the troops might cross. The evening before there had been skirmishes at Sir John's Run and at the Big Cacapon. A regiment of Loring's destroyed the railroad bridge over the latter stream. The Federals withdrew across the river, leaving no command in Morgan County.

Throughout the afternoon McLaughlin's battery dropped sh.e.l.ls into Hanc.o.c.k, but an hour before dark came orders to cease firing. A scout--Allan Gold--brought tidings of heavy reinforcements pouring into the town from Williamsport and Hagerstown. So heavy were they that Jackson, after standing for five minutes with his face to the north, sent orders to discontinue work upon the bridge. Romney, when all was said, not Hanc.o.c.k, was his destination--Kelly's eight thousand in Virginia, not Lander's brigades across the line. Doubtless it had been his hope to capture every Federal in Bath, to reach and cross the Potomac, inflict damage, and retire before those reinforcements could come up. But the infantry which he commanded was not yet his ”foot cavalry,” and neither knew nor trusted him as it was to know and trust.

The forces about him to-day were not h.o.m.ogeneous. They pulled two ways, they were not moulded and coloured as they were to be moulded and coloured, not instinct with the one man view as they were to become instinct. They were not iron as he was iron, nor yet thunderbolts of war. They could not divine the point and hour of attack, and, sooth to say, they received scant a.s.sistance from the actual wizard. They were patriot forces, simple and manly souls ready enough to die for their cause, but few were yet at the arrowhead of concentration as was this man. They were to attain it, but not yet. He looked at the north and he looked at his complaining legions, and he strode off to his bivouac beneath a solitary tree. Here, a little later he gave orders to his brigadiers. The Army of the Northwest would resume the march ”at early dawn.”

In the harsh coldness of the morning they retraced the road to Bath, a frightful road, a road over which an army had pa.s.sed. At noon they came to Bath, but there was hardly a pause in the town. Beneath a sky of lead, in a harsh and freezing wind, the troops swung slowly into a narrow road running west through a meagre valley. Low hills were on either side--low and bleak. Scrub oak and pine grew spa.r.s.ely, and along the edges of the road dead milkweed and mullein stood gaunt above the snow. The troops pa.s.sed an old cider press and a cabin or two out of which negroes stared.

Before long they crossed a creek and began to climb. All the landscape was now mountainous. To the right, as the way mounted, opened a great view, white dales and meadows, far winter forests, and the long, long wall of North Mountain. There was small care for the view among the struggling soldiers. The hills seemed perpendicular, the earth treacherous gla.s.s. Going up, the artillerymen must drag with the horses at gun and caisson; going down the carriages must be held back, else they would slide sideways and go cras.h.i.+ng over the embankment. Again and again, going down, the horses slipped and fell. The weight of metal behind coming upon them, the whole slid in a heap to the bottom. There they must be gotten to their feet, the poor trembling brutes! and set to the task of another hill. The long, grey, halting, stumbling, creeping line saw no beauty in the winter woods, in the arched fern over the snow, in the vivid, fairy plots of moss, in the smooth, tall ailanthus stems by the wayside, in the swinging, leafless lianas of grape, pendent from the highest trees, in the imposing view of the mountains. The line was sick, sick to the heart, numbed and s.h.i.+vering, full of pain. Every ambulance and wagon used as ambulance was heavy laden; at every infrequent cabin or lonely farmhouse were left the too ill to travel farther. The poor servants, of whom there were some in each company, were in pitiable plight. No negro likes the cold; for him all the hot suns.h.i.+ne he can get! They s.h.i.+vered now, in the rear of the companies, their bodies drawn together, their faces grey. The nature of most was of an abounding cheerfulness, but it was not possible to be cheerful on this January road to Romney.

The army crossed Sleepy Creek. It was frozen to the bottom. The cedars along its sh.o.r.e stood so funereally, so c.r.a.pe-like and dark, the sycamores were so clay-white and long of arm, the great birds slowly circling above a neighbouring wood of so dreary a significance, that the heart sank and sank. Was this war?--war, heroic and glorious, with banners, trumpets, and rewarded enterprise? Mana.s.sas had been war--for one brief summer day! But ever since there was only marching, tenting, suffering, and fatigue--and fatigue--and fatigue.

Maury Stafford and the Reverend Mr. Corbin Wood found themselves riding side by side, with other mounted officers, in advance of Loring's leading regiment. The chaplain had experienced, the day before, an ugly fall. His knee was badly wrenched, and so, perforce, he rode to-day, though, as often as he thought the grey could stand it, he took up a man behind him. Now, however, he was riding single. Indeed, for the last mile he had uttered no pitiful comment and given no invitation.

Moreover, he talked persistently and was forever calling his companion's attention to the beauty of the view. At last, after a series of short answers, it occurred to Stafford to regard him more closely. There was a colour in the chaplain's cheek and he swayed ever so slightly and rhythmically in his saddle. Stafford checked his horse, drew his hand out of an ice-caked gauntlet, and leaning over laid it on the other's which was bare. The chaplain's skin was burning hot. Stafford made a sound of concern and rode forward to the colonel. In a minute he returned. ”Now you and I, Mr. Wood, will fall out here and just quietly wait until the wagons come by. Then the doctor will fix you up nicely in the ambulance.... Oh, yes, you are! You're ill enough to want to lie down for awhile. Some one else, you know, can ride Pluto.”

Corbin Wood pondered the matter. ”That's true, that's very true, my dear Maury. Fontaine, now, behind us in the ranks, his shoes are all worn out. Fontaine, eh? Fontaine knows more Greek than any man--and he'll be good to Pluto. Pluto's almost worn out himself--he's not immortal like Xanthius and Balius. Do you know, Maury, it's little wonder that Gulliver found the Houyhnhnms so detesting war? Horses have a dreadful lot in war--and the quarrel never theirs. Do but look at that stream!--how cool and pleasant, winding between the willows--”

Stafford got him to one side of the road, to a small plateau beneath an overhanging bank. The column was now crawling through a ravine with a sheer descent on the right to the frozen creek below. To the left, covering the mountain-side, were ma.s.ses of evergreen kalmia, and above them tall and leafless trees in whose branches the wind made a grating sound. The sleet was falling again--a veil of sleet. The two waiting for the ambulance looked down upon the grey soldiers, grey, weary, and bent before the wind. ”Who would ever have thought,” said the chaplain, ”that Dante took an idea from Virginia in the middle of the nineteenth century? I remember things being so happy and comfortable--but it must have been long ago. Yes, my people, long ago.” Dropping the bridle, he raised his arm in a gesture usual with him in the pulpit. In the fading light there was about him an illusion of black and white; he moved his arm as though it were clad in the sleeve of a surplice. ”I am not often denunciatory,” he said, ”but I denounce this weary going to and fro, this turning like a dervish, this finding that every straight line is but a fraction of a circle, this squirrel cage with the greenwood never reached, this interminable drama, this dance of midges,--

Through a circle that ever returneth in To the selfsame spot, And much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot--

Is it not wonderful, the gold light on the mountains?”

At last the ambulance appeared--a good one, captured at Mana.s.sas. The chaplain, still talking, was persuaded stiffly to dismount, to give Pluto's bridle into Stafford's hand, and to enter. There were other occupants, two rows of them. Stafford saw his old friend laid in a corner, on a wisp of straw; then, finding Fontaine in the ranks, gave over the grey, and joined the staff creeping, creeping on tired horses through the sleet.

Cavalry and infantry and wagon train wound at the close of day over a vast bare hilltop toward Unger's Store where, it was known, would be the bivouac. The artillery in the rear found it impossible to finish out the march. Two miles from Unger's the halt was ordered. It was full dark; neither man nor brute could stumble farther. All came to a stand high up on the wind-swept hill. The guns were left in the road, the horses led down the slope and picketted in the lee of a poor stable, placed there, it seemed, by some pitying chance. In the stable there was even found some hay and corn. The men had no supper, or only such crumbs as were found in the haversacks. They made their fires on the hillside and crouched around them, nodding uneasily, trying to sleep with faces scorched by the flame and freezing backs. They put their feet in the sodden shoes to the fire, and the poor, worn-out leather fell into yet greater holes. There was some conjecture as to how far the thermometer stood below zero. Some put it at forty, but the more conservative declared for twenty. It was impossible to sleep, and every one was hungry, and the tobacco was all out. _What were they doing at home, by the fire, after supper, with the children playing about?_

At dawn the bugles blew. Stiff and sore, racked with pains and aches, coughing, limping, savagely hungry, the men rose. Time was to come when even a dawn like this would be met by the Confederate soldier with whimsical cheer, with greetings as to an oft-encountered friend, with a courage quaint, pathetic, and divinely high--but the time was not yet.

The men swore and groaned. The haversacks were quite empty; there would be no breakfast until the wagons were caught up with at Unger's. The drivers went down the hillside for the horses. When they came to the strength that had drawn the guns and looked, there was a moment's silence. Hetterich the blacksmith was with the party, and Hetterich wept. ”If I was G.o.d, I wouldn't have it--I wouldn't have a horse treated so! Just look at Flora--just look at her knees! Ah, the poor brute!” So frequent had been the falls of the day before, so often had the animals been cut by the carriages coming upon them, that many were scarred in a dreadful fas.h.i.+on. The knees of Flora had been badly cut, and what Hetterich pointed at were long red icicles hanging from the wounds.

At Unger's the evening before, in a narrow valley between the silver hills, the infantry stacked arms, broke ranks, and listened with sullen brows to two pieces of news. At Hanging Rock, between Unger's and Romney, the advance, composed of a regiment of militia and a section of artillery, had come into touch with the enemy. The militia had broken, the two guns had been lost. ”Fool Tom Jackson” was reported to have said, ”Good! good!” and lifted that right hand of his to the sky. The other tidings were to the effect that the troops would rest at Unger's for three days, to the end, chiefly, that the horses might be rough-shod. Rest--delicious sound! But Unger's! To the east the unutterably bleak hills over which they had toiled, to the west Capon Mountain high and stark against the livid skies, to the south a dark forest with the snow beneath the trees, to the north long, low hills, with faded broomsedge waving in the wind. Upon a hilltop perched a country store, a blacksmith shop, and one or two farmhouses, forlorn and lonely in the twilight, and by the woods ran Buffalo Run, ice upon the shallows to either bank.

In the morning, when the artillery was up, when breakfast was over, roll called, orders read, the army fell to the duties upon which paramount stress had been laid. All the farriers, the drivers, the men who had to do with horses, went to work with these poor, wretched, lame, and wounded friends, feeding them, currying them, dressing their hurts and, above all, rough-shoeing them in preparation for the icy mountains ahead. The clink of iron against iron made a pleasant sound; moreover, this morning, the sun shone. Very cold as it was, there was cheer in the sky. Even the crows cawing above the woods did not sound so dolefully. A Thunder Run man found a tree laden with shrivelled persimmons. He was up it like a squirrel. ”Simmon tree! Simmon tree!” Comrades came hurrying over the snow; the fruit was dropped into upheld caps, lifted toward eager mouths. Suddenly there flamed a generous impulse. ”Boys! them poor sick fellows with nothing but hardtack--” The persimmons were carried to the hospital tents.

Before the sun was halfway to the meridian a curious spectacle appeared along the banks of Buffalo Run. Every hundred feet or so was built a large fire. Over it hung a camp kettle, full of water--water hot as the fire could make it. Up and down the stream an improvised laundry went into operation, while, squad by squad, the men performed their personal ablutions. It was the eighth of January; they had left Winchester upon the first, and small, indeed, since then had been the use of was.h.i.+ng water. In the dire cold, with the streams frozen, cleanliness had not tempted the majority, and indeed, latterly, the men had been too worn out to care. Sleep and food and warmth had represented the sum of earthly desire. A number, with ostentation, had each morning broken the ice from some pool or other and bathed face and hands, but few extended the laved area. The General Order appointing a Washerman's Day came none too soon. Up and down Buffalo Run, in the zero weather, the men stripped and bathed. Soap was not yet the scarce and valuable commodity it was to become; there was soap enough for all and the camp kettles were filled from the stream as soon as emptied. Underclothing, too, flannel and cotton, must be washed.... There came discoveries, made amid ”Ughs!” of disgust. The more fastidious threw the whole business, undergarment and parasites into the fire; others, more reasonable, or without a change of clothing, scalded their apparel with anxious care. The episode marked a stage in warfare. That night Lieutenant Coffin, writing a letter on his last sc.r.a.p of pale blue paper, sat with scrupulously washed hands well back from the board he was using as a table. His boyish face flushed, his lips quivered as he wrote. He wrote of lilies and moss rose-buds and the purity of women, and he said there was a side of war which Walter Scott had never painted.