________________________________________________
_ The noise of the guns rolled over the green hills into the little valley
where the regiment had halted before a wayside spring, which lay hidden
beneath a clump of rank pokeberry. As each company filled its canteens, it
filed across the sunny road, from which the dust rose like steam, and stood
resting in an open meadow that swept down into a hollow between two gently
rising hills. From the spring a thin stream trickled, bordered by short
grass, and the water, dashed from it by the thirsty men, gathered in
shining puddles in the red clay road. By one of these puddles a man had
knelt to wash his face, and as Dan passed, draining his canteen, he looked
up with a sprinkling of brown drops on his forehead. Near him, unharmed by
the tramping feet, a little purple flower was blooming in the mud.
Dan gazed thoughtfully down upon him and upon the little purple flower in
its dangerous spot. What did mud or dust matter, he questioned grimly, when
in a breathing space they would be in the midst of the smoke that hung
close above the hill-top? The sound of the cannon ceased suddenly, as
abruptly as if the battery had sunk into the ground, and through the sunny
air he heard a long rattle that reminded him of the fall of hail on the
shingled roof at Chericoke. As his canteen struck against his side, it
seemed to him that it met the resistance of a leaden weight. There was a
lump in his throat and his lips felt parched, though the moisture from the
fresh spring water was hardly dried. When he moved he was conscious of
stepping high above the earth, as he had done once at college after an
over-merry night and many wines.
Straight ahead the sunshine lay hot and still over the smooth fields and
the little hollow where a brook ran between marshy banks. High above he saw
it flashing on the gray smoke that hung in tatters from the tree-tops on
the hill.
An ambulance, drawn by a white and a bay horse, turned gayly from the road
into the meadow, and he saw, with surprise, that one of the surgeons was
trimming his finger nails with a small penknife. The surgeon was a slight
young man, with pointed yellow whiskers, and light blue eyes that squinted
in the sunshine. As he passed he stifled a yawn with an elaborate
affectation of unconcern.
A man on horseback, with a white handkerchief tied above his collar,
galloped up and spoke in a low voice to the Colonel. Then, as his horse
reared, he glanced nervously about, grew embarrassed, and, with a sharp
jerk of the bridle, galloped off again across the field. Presently other
men rode back and forth along the road; there were so many of them that Dan
wondered, bewildered, if anybody was left to make the battle beyond the
hill.
The regiment formed into line and started at "double quick" across the
broad meadow powdered white with daisies. As it went into the ravine,
skirting the hillside, a stream of men came toward it and passed slowly to
the rear. Some were on stretchers, some were stumbling in the arms of
slightly wounded comrades, some were merely warm and dirty and very much
afraid. One and all advised the fresh regiment to "go home and finish
ploughing." "The Yankees have got us on the hip," they declared
emphatically. "Whoopee! it's as hot as hell where you're going." Then a
boy, with a blood-stained sleeve, waved his shattered arm in the air and
laughed deliriously. "Don't believe them, friends, it's glorious!" he
cried, in the voice of the far South, and lurched forward upon the grass.
The sight of the soaked shirt and the smell of blood turned Dan faint. He
felt a sudden tremor in his limbs, and his arteries throbbed dully in his
ears. "I didn't know it was like this," he muttered thickly. "Why, they're
no better than mangled rabbits--I didn't know it was like this."
They wound through the little ravine, climbed a hillside planted in thin
corn, and were ordered to "load and lie down" in a strip of woodland. Dan
tore at his cartridge with set teeth; then as he drove his ramrod home, a
shell, thrown from a distant gun, burst in the trees above him, and a red
flame ran, for an instant, along the barrel of his musket. He dodged
quickly, and a rain of young pine needles fell in scattered showers from
the smoked boughs overhead. Somewhere beside him a man was groaning in
terror or in pain. "I'm hit, boys, by God, I'm hit this time." The groans
changed promptly into a laugh. "Bless my soul! the plagued thing went right
into the earth beneath me."
"Damn you, it went into my leg," retorted a hoarse voice that fell suddenly
silent.
With a shiver Dan lay down on the carpet of rotted pine-cones and peered,
like a squirrel, through the meshes of the brushwood. At first he saw only
gray smoke and a long sweep of briers and broom-sedge, standing out dimly
from an obscurity that was thick as dusk. Then came a clatter near at hand,
and a battery swept at a long gallop across the thinned edge of the pines.
So close it came that he saw the flashing white eyeballs and the spreading
sorrel manes of the horses, and almost felt their hot breath upon his
cheek. He heard the shouts of the outriders, the crack of the stout whips,
the rattle of the caissons, and, before it passed, he had caught the
excited gestures of the men upon the guns. The battery unlimbered, as he
watched it, shot a few rounds from the summit of the hill, and retreated
rapidly to a new position. When the wind scattered the heavy smoke, he saw
only the broom-sedge and several ridges of poor corn; some of the gaunt
stalks blackened and beaten to the ground, some still flaunting their brave
tassels beneath the whistling bullets. It was all in sunlight, and the gray
smoke swept ceaselessly to and fro over the smiling face of the field.
Then, as he turned a little in his shelter, he saw that there was a single
Confederate battery in position under a slight swell on his left. Beyond it
he knew that the long slope sank gently into a marshy stream and the broad
turnpike, but the brow of the hill went up against the sky, and hidden in
the brushwood he could see only the darkened line of the horizon. Against
it the guns stood there in the sunlight, unsupported, solitary, majestic,
while around them the earth was tossed up in the air as if a loose plough
had run wild across the field. A handful of artillerymen moved back and
forth, like dim outlines, serving the guns in a group of fallen horses that
showed in dark mounds upon the hill. From time to time he saw a rammer
waved excitedly as a shot went home, or heard, in a lull, the hoarse voices
of the gunners when they called for "grape!"
As he lay there, with his eyes on the solitary battery, he forgot, for an
instant, his own part in the coming work. A bullet cut the air above him,
and a branch, clipped as by a razor's stroke, fell upon his head; but his
nerves had grown steady and his thoughts were not of himself; he was
watching, with breathless interest, for another of the gray shadows at the
guns to go down among the fallen horses.
Then, while he watched, he saw other batteries come out upon the hill; saw
the cannon thrown into position and heard the call change from "grape!" to
"canister!" On the edge of the pines a voice was speaking, and beyond the
voice a man on horseback was riding quietly back and forth in the open.
Behind him Jack Powell called out suddenly, "We're ready, Colonel Burwell!"
and his voice was easy, familiar, almost affectionate.
"I know it, boys!" replied the Colonel in the same tone, and Dan felt a
quick sympathy spring up within him. At that instant he knew that he loved
every man in the regiment beside him--loved the affectionate Colonel, with
the sleepy voice, loved Pinetop, loved the lieutenant whose nose he had
broken after drill.
At a word he had leaped, with the others, to his feet, and stood drawn up
for battle against the wood. Then it was that he saw the General of the day
riding beside fluttering colours across the waste land to the crest of the
hill. He was rallying the scattered brigades about the flag--so the fight
had gone against them and gone badly, after all.
Around him the men drifted back, frightened, straggling, defeated, and the
broken ranks closed up slowly. The standards dipped for a moment before a
sharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds,
soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.
It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against the
pines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered a
mountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. He
heard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and the
crackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacing
boughs. The old childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his mad
rush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the wooded
twilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the open
that he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.
Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped his
musket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and he
repeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Once
again, when he stood on the trampled broom-sedge, he said them over with a
nervous jerk, "Wait until they come within fifty yards--and, for God's
sake, boys, shoot at the knees!"
He thought of the jolly Colonel, and laughed hysterically. Why, he had been
at that man's wedding--had kissed his bride--and now he was begging him to
shoot at people's knees!
With a cheer, the regiment broke from cover and swept forward toward the
summit of the hill. Dan's foot caught in a blackberry vine, and he stumbled
blindly. As he regained himself a shell ripped up the ground before him,
flinging the warm clods of earth into his face. A "worm" fence at a little
distance scattered beneath the fire, and as he looked up he saw the long
rails flying across the field. For an instant he hesitated; then something
that was like a nervous spasm shook his heart, and he was no more afraid.
Over the blackberries and the broom-sedge, on he went toward the swirls of
golden dust that swept upward from the bright green slope. If this was a
battle, what was the old engraving? Where were the prancing horses and the
uplifted swords?
Something whistled in his ears and the air was filled with sharp sounds
that set his teeth on edge. A man went down beside him and clutched at his
boots as he ran past; but the smell of the battle--a smell of oil and
smoke, of blood and sweat--was in his nostrils, and he could have kicked
the stiff hands grasping at his feet. The hot old blood of his fathers had
stirred again and the dead had rallied to the call of their descendant. He
was not afraid, for he had been here long before.
Behind him, and beside him, row after row of gray men leaped from the
shadow--the very hill seemed rising to his support--and it was almost
gayly, as the dead fighters lived again, that he went straight onward over
the sunny field. He saw the golden dust float nearer up the slope, saw the
brave flags unfurling in the breeze--saw, at last, man after man emerge
from the yellow cloud. As he bent to fire, the fury of the game swept over
him and aroused the sleeping brute within him. All the primeval instincts,
throttled by the restraint of centuries--the instincts of bloodguiltiness,
of hot pursuit, of the fierce exhilaration of the chase, of the death
grapple with a resisting foe--these awoke suddenly to life and turned the
battle scarlet to his eyes.
* * * * *
Two hours later, when the heavy clouds were smothering the sunset, he came
slowly back across the field. A gripping nausea had seized upon him--a
nausea such as he had known before after that merry night at college. His
head throbbed, and as he walked he staggered like a drunken man. The
revulsion of his overwrought emotions had thrown him into a state of
sensibility almost hysterical.
The battle-field stretched grimly round him, and as the sunset was blotted
out, a gray mist crept slowly from the west. Here and there he saw men
looking for the wounded, and he heard one utter an impatient "Pshaw!" as he
lifted a half-cold body and let it fall. Rude stretchers went by him on
either side, and still the field seemed as thickly sown as before; on the
left, where a regiment of Zouaves had been cut down, there was a flash of
white and scarlet, as if the loose grass was strewn with great tropical
flowers. Among them he saw the reproachful eyes of dead and dying horses.
Before him, on the gradual slope of the hill, stood a group of abandoned
guns, and there was something almost human in the pathos of their utter
isolation. Around them the ground was scorched and blackened, and scattered
over the broken trails lay the men who had fallen at their post. He saw
them lying there in the fading daylight, with the sponges and the rammers
still in their hands, and he saw upon each man's face the look with which
he had met and recognized the end. Some were smiling, some staring, and one
lay grinning as if at a ghastly joke. Near him a boy, with the hair still
damp on his forehead, had fallen upon an uprooted blackberry vine, and the
purple stain of the berries was on his mouth. As Dan looked down upon him,
the smell of powder and burned grass came to him with a wave of sickness,
and turning he stumbled on across the field. At the first step his foot
struck upon something hard, and, picking it up, he saw that it was a Minie
ball, which, in passing through a man's spine, had been transformed into a
mass of mingled bone and lead. With a gesture of disgust he dropped it and
went on rapidly. A stretcher moved beside him, and the man on it, shot
through the waist, was saying in a whisper, "It is cold--cold--so cold."
Against his will, Dan found, he had fallen into step with the men who bore
the stretcher, and together they kept time to the words of the wounded
soldier who cried out ceaselessly that it was cold. On their way they
passed a group on horseback and, standing near it, a handsome artilleryman,
who wore a red flannel shirt with one sleeve missing. As Dan went on he
discovered that he was thinking of the handsome man in the red shirt and
wondering how he had lost his missing sleeve. He pondered the question as
if it were a puzzle, and, finally, yielded it up in doubt.
Beyond the base of the hill they came into the small ravine which had been
turned into a rude field hospital. Here the stretcher was put down, and a
tired-looking surgeon, wiping his hands upon a soiled towel, came and knelt
down beside the wounded man.
"Bring a light--I can't see--bring a light!" he exclaimed irritably, as he
cut away the clothes with gentle fingers.
Dan was passing on, when he heard his name called from behind, and turning
quickly found Governor Ambler anxiously regarding him.
"You're not hurt, my boy?" asked the Governor, and from his tone he might
have parted from the younger man only the day before.
"Hurt? Oh, no, I'm not hurt," replied Dan a little bitterly, "but there's a
whole field of them back there, Colonel."
"Well, I suppose so--I suppose so," returned the other absently. "I'm
looking after my men now, poor fellows. A victory doesn't come cheap, you
know, and thank God, it was a glorious victory."
"A glorious victory," repeated Dan, looking at the surgeons who were
working by the light of tallow candles.
The Governor followed his gaze. "It's your first fight," he said, "and you
haven't learned your lesson as I learned mine in Mexico. The best, or the
worst of it, is that after the first fight it comes easy, my boy, it comes
too easy."
There was hot blood in him also, thought Dan, as he looked at him--and yet
of all the men that he had ever known he would have called the Governor the
most humane.
"I dare say--I'll get used to it, sir," he answered. "Yes, it was a
glorious victory."
He broke away and went off into the twilight over the wide meadow to the
little wayside spring. Across the road there was a field of clover, where a
few campfires twinkled, and he hastened toward it eager to lie down in the
darkness and fall asleep. As his feet sank in the moist earth, he looked
down and saw that the little purple flower was still blooming in the mud. _
Read next: BOOK THIRD - THE SCHOOL OF WAR: Chapter IV - After the Battle
Read previous: BOOK THIRD - THE SCHOOL OF WAR: Chapter II - The Day's March
Table of content of Battle Ground
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
