The Long Roll
Street, in the moonlight, under the odour of the white locust clusters.
The churches were lit and open; in each there was brief service, well
attended. Later, from the porch of the old hotel, there was speaking. It
drew toward eleven o'clock. The moon was high, the women and children
all housed, the oldest men, spent with the strain of the day, also gone
to their homes, or their friends' homes. The Volunteers and a faithful
few were left. They could not sleep; if war was going to be always as
exciting as this, how did soldiers ever sleep? There was not among them
a man who had ever served in war, so the question remained unanswered. A
Thunder Run man volunteered the information that the captain was
asleep--he had been to the house where the captain lodged and his mother
had come to the door with her finger on her lips, and he had looked
past her and seen Captain Cleave lying on a sofa fast asleep. Thunder
Run's comrades listened, but they rather doubted the correctness of his
report. It surely wasn't very soldier-like to sleep--even upon a
sofa--the night before marching away! The lieutenants weren't asleep.
Hairston Breckinridge had a map spread out upon a bench before the post
office, and was demonstrating to an eager dozen the indubitable fact
that the big victory would be either at Harper's Ferry or Alexandria.
Young Matthew Coffin was in love, and might be seen through the hotel
window writing, candles all around him, at a table, covering one pale
blue sheet after another with impassioned farewells. Sergeants and
corporals and men were wakeful. Some of these, too, were writing
letters, sending messages; others joined in the discussion as to the
theatre of war, or made knots of their own, centres of conjectures and
prophecy; others roamed the streets, or down by the river bank watched
the dark stream. Of these, a few proposed to strip and have a swim--who
knew when they'd see the old river again? But the notion was frowned
upon. One must be dressed and ready. At that very moment, perhaps, a man
might be riding into town with the order. The musicians were not asleep.
Young Matthew Coffin, sealing his letter some time after midnight, and
coming out into the moonlight and the fragrance of the locust trees, had
an inspiration. All was in readiness for the order when it should come,
and who, in the meantime, wanted to do so prosaic a thing as rest?
"Boys, let us serenade the ladies!"
The silver night wore on. So many of the "boys" had sisters, that there
were many pretty ladies staying in the town or at the two or three
pleasant old houses upon its outskirts. Two o'clock, three o'clock
passed, and there were yet windows to sing beneath. Old love songs
floated through the soft and dreamy air; there was a sense of angelic
beings in the unlit rooms above, even of the flutter of their wings.
Then, at the music's dying fall, flowers were thrown; there seemed to
descend a breath, a whisper, "Adieu, heroes--adored, adored heroes!" A
scramble for the flowers, then out at the gate and on to the next house,
and so _da capo_.
Dawn, though the stars were yet shining, began to make itself felt. A
coldness was in the air, a mist arose from the river, there came a
sensation of arrest, of somewhere an icy finger upon the pulse of life.
Maxwelton's braes are bonnie,
Where early fa's the dew,
And 't was there that Annie Laurie
Gie'd me her promise true,--
They were singing now before an old brick house in the lower street.
There were syringas in bloom in the yard. A faint light was rising in
the east, the stars were fading.
Gie'd me her promise true
Which ne'er forgot shall be--
Suddenly, from High Street, wrapped in mist, a bugle rang out. The
order--the order--the order to the front! It called again, sounding the
assembly. _Fall in, men, fall in!_
At sunrise Richard Cleave's company went away. There was a dense crowd
in the misty street, weeping, cheering. An old minister, standing beside
the captain, lifted his arms--the men uncovered, the prayer was said,
the blessing given. Again the bugle blew, the women cried farewell. The
band played "Virginia," the flag streamed wide in the morning wind.
Good-bye, good-bye, and again good-bye! _Attention! Take arms! Shoulder
arms! Right face!_ FORWARD, MARCH!
CHAPTER VI
BY ASHBY'S GAP
The 65th Virginia Infantry, Colonel Valentine Brooke, was encamped to
the north of Winchester in the Valley of Virginia, in a meadow through
which ran a stream, and upon a hillside beneath a hundred chestnut
trees, covered with white tassels of bloom. To its right lay the 2d, the
4th, the 5th, the 27th, and the 33d Virginia, forming with the 65th the
First Brigade, General T. J. Jackson. The battery attached--the
Rockbridge Artillery--occupied an adjacent apple orchard. To the left,
in other July meadows and over other chestnut-shaded hills, were spread
the brigades of Bee, Bartow, and Elzey. Somewhere in the distance,
behind the screen of haze, were Stuart and his cavalry. Across the
stream a brick farmhouse, ringed with mulberry trees, made the
headquarters of Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the forces of the
Confederacy--an experienced, able, and wary soldier, engaged just now,
with eleven thousand men, in watching Patterson with fifteen thousand on
the one hand, and McDowell with thirty-five thousand on the other, and
in listening attentively for a voice from Beauregard with twenty
thousand at Manassas. It was the middle of July, 1861.
First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree--a little
removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden
table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for.
At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J.
Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen
chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before
him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of
each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An
awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his
health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace,
romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and
feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce
and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the
idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had
fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and
formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He
drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the
sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blench. A
blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came
reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness
quite like Nature's. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but
little sense of humour, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water
and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had
caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a raw-boned nag named Little
Sorrel, he carried his sabre in the oddest fashion, and said "oblike"
instead of "oblique." He found his greatest pleasure in going to the
Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the
week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something,
but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it
promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these
were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic,
tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude,
monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy
of the sepulchre, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his
staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicity
of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious
captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the
late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the
Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper's Ferry, where,
as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston's arrival, he
had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited
rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable;
true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with
Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks
not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters
Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental
reservations, began to call him "Old Jack." The epithet implied
approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact,
they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!
The Army of the Shenandoah was a civilian army, a high-spirited,
slightly organized, more or less undisciplined, totally inexperienced in
war, impatient and youthful body of men, with the lesson yet to learn
that the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a curve. In
its eyes Patterson at Bunker Hill was exclusively the blot upon the
escutcheon, and the whole game of war consisted in somehow doing away
with that blot. There was great chafing at the inaction. It was hot,
argumentative July weather; the encampment to the north of Winchester in
the Valley of Virginia hummed with the comments of the strategists in
the ranks. Patterson should have been attacked after Falling Waters.
What if he was entrenched behind stone walls at Martinsburg? Patterson
should have been attacked upon the fifteenth at Bunker Hill. What if he
has fifteen thousand men?--what if he has _twenty_ thousand?--What if
McDowell is preparing to cross the Potomac? And now, on the seventeenth,
Patterson is at Charlestown, creeping eastward, evidently going to
surround the Army of the Shenandoah! Patterson is the burning reality
and McDowell the dream--and yet Johnston won't move to the westward and
attack! _Good Lord! we didn't come from home just to watch these
chestnuts get ripe! All the generals are crazy, anyhow._
It was nine, in the morning of Thursday the eighteenth,--a scorching
day. The locusts were singing of the heat; the grass, wherever men,
horses, and wagon wheels had not ground it into dust, was parched to a
golden brown; the mint by the stream looked wilted. The morning drill
was over, the 65th lounging beneath the trees. It was almost too hot to
fuss about Patterson, almost too hot to pity the sentinels, almost too
hot to wonder where Stuart's cavalry had gone that morning, and why "Old
Joe" quartered behind the mulberries in the brick farmhouse, had sent a
staff officer to "Old Jack," and why Bee's and Bartow's and Elzey's
brigades had been similarly visited; almost too hot to play checkers, to
whittle a set of chessmen, to finish that piece of Greek, to read
"Ivanhoe" and resolve to fight like Brian de Bois Gilbert and Richard
Coeur de Lion in one, to write home, to rout out knapsack and
haversack, and look again at fifty precious trifles; too hot to smoke,
to tease Company A's pet coon, to think about Thunder Run, to wonder how
pap was gettin' on with that thar piece of corn, and what the girls were
sayin'; too hot to borrow, too hot to swear, too hot to go down to the
creek and wash a shirt, too hot--"What's that drum beginning for? _The
long roll! The Army of the Valley is going to move! Boys, boys, boys! We
are going north to Charlestown! Boys, boys, boys! We are going to lick
Patterson!_"
At noon the Army of the Valley, the First Brigade leading, uncoiled