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The Long Roll, a novel by Mary Johnston |
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Chapter 48. The River |
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_ CHAPTER XLVIII. THE RIVER It yet lacked of six o'clock when the battle lines were finally formed. Only the treetops of the Wilderness now were in gold, below, in the thick wood, the brigades stood in shadow. In front were Rodes's skirmishers, and Rodes's brigades formed the first line. The troops of Raleigh Colston made the second line, A. P. Hill's men the third. A battery--four Napoleons--were advanced; the other guns were coming up. The cavalry, with Stonewall Brigade supporting, took the Plank road, masking the actual movement. On the old turnpike Stonewall Jackson sat his horse beside Rodes. At six o'clock he looked at his watch, closed it, and put it in his pocket. "Are you ready, General Rodes?" "Yes, sir." "You can go forward, sir." High over the darkening Wilderness rang a bugle-call. The sound soared, hung a moment poised, then, far and near, thronged the grey echoes, bugles, bugles, calling, calling! The sound passed away; there followed a rush of bodies through the Wilderness; in a moment was heard the crackling fire of the skirmishers. From ahead came a wild beating of Federal drums--the long roll, the long roll! Boom! Into action came the grey guns. Rodes's Alabamian's passed the abattis, touched the breastworks. Colston two hundred yards behind, A. P. Hill the third line. Yaaai! Yaaaiiih! Yaaaaaiiihh! rang the Wilderness. Several miles to the eastward the large old house of Chancellorsville, set upon rising ground, reflected the sun from its westerly windows. All about it rolled the Wilderness, shadowy beneath the vivid skies. It lay like a sea, touching all the horizon. On the deep porch of the house, tasting the evening coolness, sat Fighting Joe Hooker and several of his officers. Eastward there was firing, as there had been all day, but it, too, was decreased in volume, broken in continuity. The main rebel body, thought the Federal general, must be about ready to draw off, follow the rebel advance in its desperate attempt to get out of the Wilderness, to get off southward to Gordonsville. The 12th Corps was facing the "main body". The interchange of musketry, eastward there, had a desultory, waiting sound. From the south, several miles into the depth of the Wilderness, came a slow, uninterrupted booming of cannon. Pleasanton and Sickles were down there, somewhere beyond Catherine Furnace. Pleasanton and Sickles were giving chase to the rebel detachment,--whatever it was; Stonewall Jackson and a division probably--that was trying to get out of the Wilderness. At any rate, the rebel force was divided. When morning dawned it should be pounded small, piece by piece, by the blue impact! "We've got the men, and we've got the guns. We've got the finest army on the planet!" The sun dropped. The Wilderness rolled like a sea, hiding many things. The shaggy pile of the forest turned from green to violet. It swept to the pale northern skies, to the eastern, reflecting light from the opposite quarter, to the southern, to the splendid west. Wave after wave, purple-hued, velvet-soft, it passed into mist beneath the skies. There was a perception of a vastness not comprehended. One of the men upon the Chancellor's porch cleared his throat. "There's an awful feeling about this place! It's poetic, I suppose. Anyhow, it makes you feel that anything might happen--the stranger it was, the likelier to happen--" "I don't feel that way. It's just a great big rolling plain with woods upon it--no mountains or water--" "Well, I always thought that if I were a great big thing going to happen I wouldn't choose a chopped up, picturesque place to happen in! I'd choose something like this. I--" "What's that?" Boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom! Hooker, at the opposite end of the porch, sprang up and came across. "Due west!--Howard's guns?--What does that mean--" Boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom! Fighting Joe Hooker ran down the steps. "Bring my horse, quick! Colonel, go down to the road and see--" "My God! Here they come!" Down the Plank road, through the woods, back to Chancellorsville, rushed the routed 21st Corps. Soldiers and ambulances, wagons and cattle, gunners lacking their guns, companies out of regiments, squads out of companies, panic-struck and flying units, shouting officers brandishing swords, horsemen, colour-bearers without colours, others with colours desperately saved, musicians, sutlers, camp followers, ordnance wagons with tearing, maddened horses, soldiers and soldiers and soldiers--down, back to the centre at Chancellorsville, roared the blue wave, torn, churned to foam, lashed and shattered, broken against a stone wall--back on the centre roared and fell the flanked right! Down the Plank road, out of the dark woods of the Wilderness, out of the rolling musketry, behind it the cannon thunder, burst a sound, a sound, a known sound! Yaaaai! Yaaaaaiih! Yaaiii! Yaaaaiiihhhhh! It echoed, it echoed from the east of Chancellorsville! Yaaih! Yaaaaiih! Yaaaaaaaiihh! yelled the troops of McLaws and Anderson. "Open fire!" said Lee to his artillery; and to McLaws, "Move up the turnpike and attack." The Wilderness of Spottsylvania laid aside her mantle of calm. She became a maenad, intoxicated, furious, shrieking, a giantess in action, a wild handmaid drinking blood, a servant of Ares, a Titanic hostess spreading with lavish hands large ground for armies and battles, a Valkyrie gathering the dead, laying them in the woodland hollows amid bloodroot and violets! She chanted, she swayed, she cried aloud to the stars, and she shook her own madness upon the troops, very impartially, on grey and on blue. Down the Plank road, in the gathering night, the very fulness of the grey victory brought its difficulties. Brigades were far ahead, separated from their division commanders; regiments astray from their brigadiers, companies struggling in the dusk through the thickets, seeking the thread from which in the onset and uproar the beads had slipped. They lost themselves in the wild place; there came perforce a pause, a quest for organization and alignment, a drawing together, a compressing of the particles of the thunderbolt; then, then would it be hurled again, full against Chancellorsville! The moon was coming up. She silvered the Wilderness about Dowdall's Tavern. She made a pallor around the group of staff and field officers gathered beside the road. Her light glinted on Stonewall Jackson's sabre, and on the worn braid of the old forage cap. A body of cavalry passed on its way to Ely's Ford. Jeb Stuart rode at the head. He was singing. "Old Joe Hooker, won't you come out of the Wilderness? " he sang. An officer of Rodes came up. "General Rodes reports, sir, that he has taken a line of their entrenchments. He's less than a mile from Chancellorsville." "Good! Tell him A. P. Hill will support. As you go, tell the troops that I wish them to get into line and preserve their order." The officer went. An aide of Colston's appeared, breathless from a struggle through the thickets. "From General Colston, sir. He's immediately behind General Rodes. There was a wide abattis. The troops are reforming beyond it. We see no Federals between us and Chancellorsville." "Good! Tell General Colston to use expedition and get his men into line. Those guns are opening without orders!" Three grey cannon, planted within bowshot of the Chancellor House, opened, indeed, and with vigour,--opened against twenty-two guns in epaulements on the Chancellorsville ridge. The twenty-two answered in a roar of sound, overtowering the cannonade to the east of McLaws and Anderson. The Wilderness resounded; smoke began to rise like the smoke of strange sacrifices; the mood of the place changed to frenzy. She swung herself, she chanted.
The thunder of the guns ceased suddenly. There was heard a trample of feet, A. P. Hill's brigades on the turnpike. "Who leads?" asked a voice. "Lane's North Carolinians," answered another. General Lane came by, young, an old V. M. I. cadet. He drew rein a moment, saluted. "Push right ahead, Lane! right ahead!" said Jackson. A. P. Hill, in his battle shirt, appeared, his staff behind him. "Your final order, general?" "Press them, Hill! Cut them off from the fords. Press them!" A. P. Hill went. From the east, the guns upon his own front now having quieted, rolled the thunder of those with Lee. The clamour about Chancellorsville where, in hot haste, Hooker made dispositions, streamed east and west, meeting and blending with, westward, a like distraction of forming commands, of battle lines made in the darkness, among thickets. The moon was high, but not observed; the Wilderness fiercely chanting. Behind him was Captain Wilbourne of the Signal Corps, two aides and several couriers, Jackson rode along the Plank road. There was a regiment drawn across this way through the Wilderness, on the road and in the woods on either hand. In places in the Wilderness, the scrub that fearfully burned the next day and the next was even now afire, and gave, though uncertainly and dimly, a certain illumination. By it the regiment was perceived. It seemed composed of tall and shadowy men. "What troops are these?" asked the general. "Lane's North Carolinians, sir,--the 18th." As he passed, the regiment started to cheer. He shook his head. "Don't, men, we want quiet now!" A very few hundred yards from Chancellorsville he checked Little Sorrel. The horse stood, fore feet planted. Horse and rider, they stood and listened. Hooker's reserves were up. About the Chancellor House, on the Chancellorsville ridge, they were throwing up entrenchments. They were digging the earth with bayonets, they were heaping it up with their hands. There was a ringing of axes. They were cutting down the young spring growth; they were making an abattis. Tones of command could be heard. "Hurry, hurry--hurry! They mean to rush us. Hurry--hurry!" A dead creeper mantling a dead tree, caught by some flying spark, suddenly flared throughout its length, stood a pillar of fire, and showed redly the enemy's guns. Stonewall Jackson sat his horse and looked. "Cut them off from the ford," he said. "Never let them get out of Virginia." He jerked his hand into the air. Turning Little Sorrel, he rode back along the Plank road toward his own lines. The light of the burning brush had sunken. The cannon smoke floating in the air, the very thick woods, made all things obscure. "There are troops across the road in front," said an aide. "Yes. Lane's North Carolinians awaiting their signal." A little to the east and south broke out in the Wilderness a sudden rattling fire, sinking, rising, sinking again, the blue and grey skirmishers now in touch. All through the vast, dark, tangled beating heart of the place, sprang into being a tension. The grey lines listened for the word Advance! The musket rested on the shoulder, the foot quivered, eyes front tried to pierce the darkness. Sound was unceasing; and yet the mind found a stillness, a lake of calm. It was the moment before the moment. Stonewall Jackson came toward the Carolinians. He rode quickly, past the dark shell of a house sunken among pines. There were with him seven or eight persons. The horses' hoofs made a trampling on the Plank road. The woods were deep, the obscurity great. Suddenly out of the brush rang a shot, an accidentally discharged rifle. Some grey soldier among Lane's tensely waiting ranks, dressed in the woods to the right of the road, spoke from the core of a fearful dream: "Yankee cavalry!" "Fire!" called an officer of the 18th North Carolina. The volley, striking diagonally across the road, emptied several saddles. Stonewall Jackson, the aides and Wilbourne, wheeled to the left, dug spur, and would have plunged into the wood. "Fire!" said the Carolinians, dressed to the left of the road, and fired. Little Sorrel, maddened, dashed into the wood. An oak bough struck his rider, almost bearing him from the saddle. With his right hand from which the blood was streaming, in which a bullet was imbedded, he caught the bridle, managed to turn the agonized brute into the road again. There seemed a wild sound, a confusion of voices. Some one had stopped the firing. "My God, men! You are firing into us!" In the road were the aides. They caught the rein, stopped the horse. Wilbourne put up his arms. "General, general! you are not hurt?--Hold there!--Morrison--Leigh!--" They laid him on the ground beneath the pines and they fired the brushwood for a light. One rode off for Dr. McGuire, and another with a penknife cut away the sleeve from the left arm through which had gone two bullets. A mounted man came at a gallop and threw himself from his horse. It was A. P. Hill. "General, general! you are not much hurt?" "Yes, I think I am," said Stonewall Jackson. "And my wounds are from my own men." Hill drew off the gauntlets that were all blood soaked, and with his handkerchief tried to bind up the arm, shattered and with the main artery cut. A courier came up. "Sir, sir! a body of the enemy is close at hand--" The aides lifted the wounded general. "No one," said Hill, "must tell the troops who was wounded." The other opened his eyes. "Tell them simply that you have a wounded officer. General Hill, you are in command now. Press right on." With a gesture of sorrow Hill went, returning to the front. The others rested at the edge of the road. At that moment the Federal batteries opened, a hissing storm of shot and shell, a tornado meant measurably to retard that anticipated, grey onrush. The range was high. Aides and couriers laid the wounded leader on the earth and made of their bodies a screen. The trees were cut, the earth was torn up; there was a howling as of unchained fiends. There passed what seemed an eternity and was but ten minutes. The great blue guns slightly changed the direction of their fire. The storm howled away from the group by the road, and the men again lifted Jackson. He stood now on his feet; and because troops were heard approaching, and because it must not be known that he was hurt, all moved into the darkness of the scrub. The troops upon the road came on--Pender's brigade. Pender, riding in advance, saw the group and asked who was wounded. "A field officer," answered one, but there came from some direction a glare of light and by it Pender knew. He sprang from his horse. "Don't say anything about it, General Pender," said Jackson. "Press on, sir, press on!" "General, they are using all their artillery. It is a very deadly fire. In the darkness it may disorganize--" The forage cap was gone. The blue eyes showed full and deep. "You must hold your ground, General Pender. You must hold out to the last, sir." "I will, general, I will," said Pender. A litter was found and brought, and Stonewall Jackson was laid upon it. The little procession moved toward Dowdall's Tavern. A shot pierced the arm of one of the bearers, loosening his hold of the litter. It tilted. The general fell heavily to the ground, injuring afresh the wounded limb, striking and bruising his side. They raised him, pale, now, and silent, and at last they struggled through the wood to a little clearing, where they found an ambulance. Now, too, came the doctor, a man whom he loved, and knelt beside him. "I hope that you are not badly hurt, general?" "Yes, I am, doctor. I am badly hurt. I fear that I am dying." In the ambulance lay also his chief of artillery, Colonel Crutchfield, painfully injured. Crutchfield pulled the doctor down to him. "He isn't badly hurt?" "Yes. Badly hurt." Crutchfield groaned. "Oh, my God!" Stonewall Jackson heard and made the ambulance stop. "You must do something for Colonel Crutchfield, doctor. Don't let him suffer." A. P. Hill, riding back to the front, was wounded by a piece of shell. Boswell, the chief engineer, to whom had been entrusted the guidance through the night of the advance upon the roads to the fords, was killed. That was a fatal cannonade from the ridge of Chancellorsville, fatal and fateful! It continued. The Wilderness chanted a battle chant indeed to the moon, the moon that was pale and wan as if wearied with silvering battlefields. Hill, lying in a litter, just back of his advanced line, dispatched couriers for Stuart. Stuart was far toward Ely's Ford, riding through the night in plume and fighting jacket. The straining horses, the recalling order, reached him. "General Jackson badly wounded! A. P. Hill badly wounded! I in command! My God, man! all changed like that? Right about face! Forward! March!" There was, that night, no grey assault. But the dawn broke clear and found the grey lines waiting. The sky was a glory, the Wilderness rolled in emerald waves, the redbirds sang. Lee and the 2d Corps were yet two miles apart. Between was Chancellorsville, and all the strong entrenchments and the great blue guns, and Hooker's courageous men. Now followed Jeb Stuart's fight. In the dawn, the 2nd Corps, swung from the right by a master hand, struck full against the Federal centre, struck full against Chancellorsville. In the clear May morning broke a thunderstorm of artillery. It raged loudly, peal on peal, crash on crash! The grey shells struck the Chancellor house. They set it on fire. It went up in flames. A fragment of shell struck and stunned Fighting Joe Hooker. He lay senseless for hours and Couch took command. The grey musketry, the blue musketry, rolled, rolled! The Wilderness was on fire. In places it was like a prairie. The flames licked their way through the scrub; the wounded perished. Ammunition began to fail; Stuart ordered the ground to be held with the bayonet. There was a great attack against his left. His three lines came into one and repulsed it. His right and Anderson's left now touched. The Army of Northern Virginia was again a unit. Stuart swung above his head the hat with the black feather. His beautiful horse danced along the grey lines, the lines that were very grimly determined, the lines that knew now that Stonewall Jackson was badly wounded. They meant, the grey lines, to make this day and this Wilderness remembered. "Forward. Charge!" cried Jeb Stuart. "Remember Jackson!" He swung his plumed hat. Yaaaii! Yaaaaaaaiihhh! Yaaaaaii! Yaaaiiiihhh! yelled the grey lines, and charged. Stuart went at their head, and as he went he raised in song his golden, ringing voice. "Old Joe Hooker, won't you come out of the Wilderness? " By ten o'clock the Chancellor ridge was taken, the blue guns silenced, Hooker beaten back toward the Rappahannock. The Wilderness, after all, was Virginian. She broke into a war song of triumph. Her flowers bloomed, her birds sang, and then came Lee to the front. Oh, the Army of Northern Virginia cheered him! "Men, men!" he said, "you have done well, you have done well! Where is General Jackson?" He was told. Presently he wrote a note and sent it to the field hospital near Dowdall's Tavern. "General:--I cannot express my regret. Could I have directed events I should have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead. I congratulate you upon the victory, which is due to your skill and energy. Very respectfully, your obedient servant, R. E. Lee." An aide read it to Stonewall Jackson where he lay, very quiet, in the deeps of the Wilderness. For a minute he did not speak, then he said, "General Lee is very kind, but he should give the praise to God." For four days yet they fought, in the Wilderness, at Salem church, at the Fords of the Rappahannock, again at Fredericksburg. Then they rested, the Army of the Potomac back on the northern side of the Rappahannock, the Army of Northern Virginia holding the southern shore and the road to Richmond--Richmond no nearer for McDowell, no nearer for McClellan, no nearer for Pope, no nearer for Burnside, no nearer for Hooker, no nearer after two years of war! In the Wilderness and thereabouts Hooker lost seventeen thousand men, thirteen guns, and fifteen hundred rounds of cannon ammunition, twenty thousand rifles, three hundred thousand rounds of infantry ammunition. The Army of Northern Virginia lost twelve thousand men. On the fifth of May Stonewall Jackson was carefully moved from the Wilderness to Guiney's Station. Here was a large old residence--the Chandler house--within a sweep of grass and trees; about it one or two small buildings. The great house was filled, crowded to its doors with wounded soldiers, so they laid Stonewall Jackson in a rude cabin among the trees. The left arm had been amputated in the field hospital. He was thought to be doing well, though at times he complained of the side which, in the fall from the litter, had been struck and bruised. At daylight on Thursday he had his physician called. "I am suffering great pain," he said. "See what is the matter with me." And presently, "Is it pneumonia?" That afternoon his wife came. He was roused to speak to her, greeted her with love, then sank into something like stupor. From time to time he awakened from this, but there were also times when he was slightly delirious. He gave orders in a shadow of the old voice. "You must hold out a little longer, men; you must hold out a little longer!... Press forward--press forward--press forward!... Give them canister, Major Pelham!" Friday went by, and Saturday. The afternoon of this day he asked for his chaplain, Mr. Lacy. Later, in the twilight, his wife sang to him, old hymns that he loved. "Sing the fifty-first psalm in verse," he said. She sang,-- "Show pity, Lord! O Lord, forgive--" The night passed and Sunday the tenth dawned. He lay quiet, his right hand on his breast. One of the staff came for a moment to his bedside. "Who is preaching at headquarters to-day?" He was told, and said, "Good! I wish I might be there." The officer's voice broke. "General, general! the whole army is praying for you. There's a message from General Lee." "Yes, yes. Give it." "He sends you his love. He says that you must recover; that you have lost your left arm, but that he would lose his right arm. He says tell you that he prayed for you last night as he had never prayed for himself. He repeats what he said in his note that for the good of Virginia and the South he could wish that he were lying here in your place--" The soldier on the bed smiled a little and shook his head. "Better ten Jacksons should lie here than one Lee." It was sunny weather, fair and sweet with all the bloom of May, the bright trees waving, the long grass rippling, waters flowing, the sky azure, bees about the flowers, the birds singing piercingly sweet, mother earth so beautiful, the sky down-bending, the light of the sun so gracious, warm, and vital! A little before noon, kneeling beside him, his wife told Stonewall Jackson that he would die. He smiled and laid his hand upon her bowed head. "You are frightened, my child! Death is not so near. I may yet get well." The doctor came to him. "Doctor, Anna tells me that I am to die to-day. Is it so?" "Oh, general, general!--It is so." He lay silent a moment, then he said, "Very good, very good! It is all right." Throughout the day his mind was now clouded, now clear. In one of the latter times he said there was something he was trying to remember. There followed a half-hour of broken sleep and wandering, in the course of which he twice spoke a name, "Deaderick." Once he said "Horse Artillery," and once "White Oak Swamp." The alternate clear moments and the lapses into stupour or delirium were like the sinking or rising of a strong swimmer, exhausted at last, the prey at last of a shoreless sea. At times he came head and shoulders out of the sea. In such a moment he opened his grey-blue eyes full on one of his staff. All the staff was gathered in grief about the bed. "When Richard Cleave," he said, "asks for a court of enquiry let him have it. Tell General Lee--" The sea drew him under again. It hardly let him go any more; moment by moment now, it wore out the strong swimmer. The day drew on to afternoon. He lay straight upon the bed, silent for the most part, but now and then wandering a little. His wife bowed herself beside him; in a corner wept the old man, Jim. Outside the windows there seemed a hush as of death. "Pass the infantry to the front!" ordered Stonewall Jackson. "Tell A. P. Hill to prepare for action!" The voice sank; there came a long silence; there was only heard the old man crying in the corner. Then, for the last time in this phase of being, the great soldier opened his eyes. In a moment he spoke, in a very sweet and calm voice. "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees." He died. * * * * * The bells tolled, the bells tolled in Richmond, tolled from each of her seven hills! Sombre was the sound of the minute guns, shaking the heart of the city! Oh, this capital knew the Dead March in Saul as a child knows his lullaby! To-day it had a depth and a height and was a dirge indeed. To-day it wailed for a Chieftain, wailed through the streets where the rose and magnolia bloomed, wailed as may have wailed the trumpets when Priam brought Hector home. The great throng to either side the streets shivered beneath the wailing, beneath the low thunder of the drums. There was lacking no pomp of War, War who must have gauds with which to hide his naked horror. The guns boomed, the bells tolled, the muffled drums beat, beat! Regiments marched with reversed arms, with colours furled. There was mournful civic pomp, mournful official. There came a great black hearse drawn by four white horses. On it lay the body of Stonewall Jackson, and over it was drawn the deep blue flag with the arms of Virginia, and likewise the starry banner of the eleven Confederate States. Oh, heart-breaking were the minute guns, and the tolling, tolling bells, and the deep, slow, heroic music, and the sobbing of the people! It was a cloudless day and filled with grief. Behind the hearse trod Little Sorrel. Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale grey stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul's they bore him, by Washington and the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the Speaker's Chair. All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker's Chair, in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy. All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired. A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes. He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He spoke in a controlled, determined voice. "What Stonewall Jackson always said was just this: 'Press forward!'" He passed on. Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill's, a young man like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a philosopher. "Hail, great man of the past!" he said. "If to-day you consort with Caesar, tell him we still make war." He, too, went on. Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the Horse Artillery. Grey-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed upon the dead soldier among the lilies. "Hooker yet upon the Rappahannock," he said. "We must have him across the Potomac, and we must ourselves invade Pennsylvania." [THE END] _ |
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