The Long Roll
virile enough, which went with the Confederate soldier into the service
and abode to the end.
The long afternoon wore to a close. The heat decreased, but the dust
remained and the weariness grew to gigantic proportions. The First
Brigade was well ahead of Bee, Bartow, and Elzey. It had started in
advance and it had increased the distance. If there was any marching in
men, Jackson forced it out; they went a league for him where another
would have procured but a mile, but even he, even enthusiasm and the
necessity of relieving Beauregard got upon this march less than two
miles an hour. Most happily, McDowell, advancing on Beauregard and Bull
Run and fearing "masked batteries," marched much more slowly. At sunset
the First Brigade reached the Shenandoah.
The mounted officers took up one and sometimes two men beside them, and
the horses struggled bravely through the cold, rapid, breast-deep
current. Behind them, company by company, the men stripped off coat and
trousers, piled clothing and ammunition upon their heads, held high
their muskets, and so crossed. The guns and wagons followed. Before the
river was passed the night fell dark.
The heat was now gone by, the dust was washed away, the men had drunk
their fill. From the haversacks they took the remnant of the food cooked
that morning. The biscuit and the bacon tasted very good; not enough of
either, it was true, but still something. The road above the river rose
steeply, for here was the Blue Ridge, lofty and dark, rude with rock,
and shaggy with untouched forests. This was the pass through the
mountains, this was Ashby's Gap. The brigade climbed with the road,
tired and silent and grim. The day had somehow been a foretaste of war;
the men had a new idea of the draught and of the depth of the cup. They
felt older, and the air, blowing down from the mountains, seemed the air
of a far country toward which they had been travelling almost without
knowing it. They saw now that it was a strange country, much unlike that
in which they had hitherto lived. They climbed slowly between dark crag
and tree, and wearily. All song and jest had died; they were tired
soldiers, hungry now for sleep. _Close up, men, close up!_
They came to the height of the pass, marked by a giant poplar whose
roots struck deep into four counties. Here again there was a ten
minutes' halt; the men sank down upon the soft beds of leaf and mould.
Their eyelids drooped; they were in a dream at once, and in a dream
heard the _Fall in--fall in, men!_ The column stumbled to its feet and
began the descent of the mountain.
Clouds came up; at midnight when they reached the lower slope, it was
raining. Later they came to the outskirts of the village of Paris, to a
grove of mighty oaks, and here the brigade was halted for the night. The
men fell upon the ground and slept. No food was taken, and no sentries
were posted. An aide, very heavy-eyed, asked if guard should not be set.
"No, sir," answered the general. "Let them sleep." "And you, sir?" "I
don't feel like it. I'll see that there is no alarm." With his cloak
about him, with his old cadet cap pulled down over his eyes, awkward and
simple and plain, he paced out the night beneath the trees, or sat upon
a broken rail fence, watching his sleeping soldiers and, the aide
thought, praying.
The light rain ceased, the sky cleared, the pale dawn came up from the
east. In the first pink light the bugles sounded. Up rose the First
Brigade, cooked and ate its breakfast, swung out from the oak grove upon
the highroad, and faced the rising sun. The morning was divinely cool,
the men in high spirits, Piedmont and the railway were but six miles
down the road. The First Brigade covered the distance by eight o'clock.
There was the station, there was the old Manassas Gap railroad, there
was the train of freight and cattle cars--ever so many freight and
cattle cars! Company after company the men piled in; by ten o'clock
every car was filled, and the platforms and roofs had their quota. The
crazy old engine blew its whistle, the First Brigade was off for
Manassas. Bee, Bartow, and Elzey, arriving at Piedmont in the course of
the morning, were not so fortunate. The railroad had promised, barring
unheard-of accident, to place the four brigades in Manassas by sunrise
of the twentieth. The accident duly arrived. There was a collision, the
track was obstructed, and only the 7th and 8th Georgia got through. The
remainder of the infantry waited perforce at Piedmont, a portion of it
for two mortal days, and that without rations. The artillery and the
cavalry--the latter having now come up--marched by the wagon road and
arrived in fair time.
From ten in the morning until sunset the First Brigade and the Manassas
Gap train crept like a tortoise through the July weather, by rustling
cornfields, by stream and wood, by farmhouse and village. It was hot in
the freight and cattle cars, hot, cinderish, and noisy. With here and
there an exception the men took off their coats, loosened the shoes from
their feet, made themselves easy in any way that suggested itself. The
subtle _give_, the slip out of convention and restraint back toward a
less trammelled existence, the faint return of the more purely
physical, the slight withdrawal of the more purely mental, the rapid
breaking down of the sheer artificial--these and other marks of one of
the many predicates of war began to show themselves in this journey. But
at the village stations there came a change. Women and girls were
gathered here, in muslin freshness, with food and drink for "our
heroes." The apparel discarded between stations was assiduously
reassumed whenever the whistle blew. "Our heroes" looked out of freight
and cattle car, somewhat grimy, perhaps, but clothed and in their right
mind, with a becoming bloom upon them of eagerness, deference, and
patriotic willingness to die in Virginia's defence. The dispensers of
nectar and ambrosia loved them all, sped them on to Manassas with many a
prayer and God bless you!
At sunset the whistle shrieked its loudest. It was their destination.
The train jolted and jerked to a halt. Regiment by regiment, out poured
the First Brigade, fell into line, and was double-quicked four miles to
Mitchell's Ford and a pine wood, where, hungry, thirsty, dirty, and
exhausted, the ranks were broken.
This was the night of the nineteenth. At Piedmont the brigade had heard
of yesterday's minor affair at this ford between Tyler's division and
Longstreet, the honours of the engagement resting with the Confederate.
In the pine wood there was a line of fresh graves; on the brown needles
lay boughs that shell had cut from the trees; there were certain stains
upon the ground. The First Brigade ate and slept--the last somewhat
feverishly. The night passed without alarm. An attack in force was
expected in the morning, but it did not come. McDowell, amazingly
enough, still rested confident that Patterson had detained Johnston in
the valley. Possessed by this belief he was now engaged in a
"reconnoissance by stealth," his object being to discover a road whereby
to cross Bull Run above the Stone Bridge and turn Beauregard's left.
This proceeding and an afternoon rest in camp occupied him the whole of
the twentieth. On this day Johnston himself reached Manassas, bringing
with him Bee's 2d Mississippi and 4th Alabama, and Bartow's 7th and 8th
Georgia. Stuart, having successfully amused Patterson, was also on hand.
The remainder of the Army of the Shenandoah, detained by the break upon
the Manassas Gap, was yet missing, and many an anxious glance the
generals cast that way.
The First Brigade, undiscovered by the "reconnoissance by stealth,"
rested all day Saturday beneath the pines at Mitchell's Ford, and at
night slept quietly, no longer minding the row of graves. At dawn of
Sunday a cannon woke the men, loud and startling, McDowell's signal gun,
fired from Centreville, and announcing to the Federal host that the
interrupted march, the "On to Richmond" blazoned on banners and chalked
on trunks, would now be resumed, willy nilly the "rebel horde" on the
southern bank of Bull Run.
CHAPTER VII
THE DOGS OF WAR
In the east was a great flare of pink with small golden clouds floating
across, all seen uncertainly between branches of pine. A mist lay above
Bull Run--on the high, opposite bank the woods rose huddled, indistinct,
and dream-like. The air was still, cool, and pure, a Sunday morning
waiting for church bells. There were no bells; the silence was
shattered by all the drums of the brigade beating the long roll. Men
rose from the pine needles, shook themselves, caught up musket and
ammunition belt. The echoes from McDowell's signal cannon had hardly
died when, upon the wooded banks of Bull Run, the First Brigade stood in
arms.
Minutes passed. Mitchell's Ford marked the Confederate centre. Here, and
at Blackburn's Ford, were Bonham, Bee, Bartow, Longstreet, and Jackson.
Down the stream, at MacLean's Ford and Union Mills, Early and Ewell and
D. R. Jones held the right. To the left, up Bull Run, beyond Bee and
beyond Stuart, at the Island, Ball and Lewis fords, were Cocke's Brigade
and Hampton's Legion, and farther yet, at the Stone Bridge, Evans with a
small brigade. Upon the northern bank of the Run, in the thick woods
opposite Mitchell's and Blackburn's fords, was believed to be the mass
of the invaders. There had been a certitude that the battle would join
about these fords. Beauregard's plan was to cross at MacLean's and fall
upon the Federal left. Johnston had acceded, and with the first light
orders had gone to the brigadiers. "Hold yourselves in readiness to
cross and to attack."
Now suddenly from the extreme left, away in the direction of the Stone
Bridge, burst an unexpected sound both of musketry and artillery. It was
distant, it waxed and waned and waxed again. The First Brigade, nervous,
impatient, chilled by the dawn, peered across its own reach of misty
stream, and saw naught but the dream-like woods. Tyler's division was
over there, it knew. When would firing begin along this line? When would
the brigade have orders to move, when would it cross, when would things
begin to happen?
An hour passed. Ranks were broken and the men allowed to cook and eat a
hasty breakfast. How good, in the mist-drenched wood, tasted the
scalding coffee, how good the cornbread and the bacon! The last crumb
swallowed, they waited again, lying on the brown earth beneath the
pines. The mounted officers, advanced upon the bank of the stream and
seen through the mist, loomed larger, man and horse, than life. Jackson
sat very quiet upon Little Sorrel, his lips moving. Far up the stream
the firing continued. The 2d, 4th, 5th, 27th, 33d, and 65th Virginia
fidgeted, groaned, swore with impatience.
Suddenly the nearer echoes awoke. A Federal battery, posted on the
hills beyond the fringe of thick wood on the northern bank, opened a
slow and ineffective fire against the hills and woods across the stream.
The Confederates kept their position masked, made no reply. The shells
fell short, and did harm only to the forest and its creatures. Nearly
all fell short, but one, a shell from a thirty-pounder Parrott, entered
the pine wood by Mitchell's Ford, fell among the wagons of the 65th, and
exploded.
A driver was killed, a mule mangled so that it must be shot, and an
ambulance split into kindling wood. Few in the First Brigade had seen
such a thing before. The men brushed the pine needles and the earth from
their coats, and looked at the furrowed ground and at the headless body
of the driver with a startled curiosity. There was a sense of a sudden
and vivid flash from behind the veil, and they as suddenly perceived
that the veil was both cold and dark. This, then, was one of the ways in