The Long Roll
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.
"Grey or blue,
I care not, I!
Blue and grey
Are here to die!
This human brood
Is stained with blood.
The armed man dies,
See where he lies
In my arms asleep!
On my breast asleep!
The babe of Time,
A nestling fallen.
The nest a ruin,
The tree storm-snapped.
Lullaby, lullaby! sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep!"
The smoke drifted toward the moon, the red gun-flashes showed the aisles
of pine and oak. Jackson beckoned imperiously to an aide. "Go tell A. P.
Hill to press forward."
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