The Long Roll
distance, Burnside was "resting," Keyes, who had taken part in the
action against Hampton, was now astray in the Bull Run Valley, and
Schenck had not even crossed the stream. There were the dead, too, the
wounded and the stragglers. All told, perhaps eleven thousand men
attacked the Henry Hill. They came on confidently, flushed with victory,
brilliant as tropical birds in the uniforms so bright and new, in the
blue, in the gold, in the fiery, zouave dress, in the Garibaldi shirt,
in the fez, the Scotch bonnet, the plume, in all the militia pomp and
circumstance of that somewhat theatrical "On to Richmond." With gleaming
muskets and gleaming swords and with the stars and stripes above them,
they advanced, huzzaing. Above them, on that plateau, ranged beneath the
stars and bars, there awaited the impact six thousand and five hundred
Confederates with sixteen guns. Three thousand of the troops were fresh;
three thousand had been long and heavily engaged, and driven from their
first position.
Rockbridge and New Orleans and their fellows worked like grey automata
about their belching guns. They made a dead line for the advance to
cross. Ricketts and Griffin answered with their howling shells--shells
that burst above the First Brigade. One stopped short of the men in
battle. It entered the Henry House, burst, and gave five wounds to the
woman cowering in her bed. Now she lay there, dying, above the armies,
and the flower-beds outside were trampled, and the boughs of the locust
trees strewn upon the earth.
Hunter and Heintzleman mounted the ridge of the hill. With an immense
volley of musketry the battle joined upon the plateau that was but five
hundred yards across. The Fire Zouaves, all red, advanced like a flame
against the 4th Alabama, crouched behind scrub oak to the left of the
field. The 4th Alabama fired, loaded, fired again. The zouaves broke,
fleeing in disorder toward a piece of woods. Out from the shadow of the
trees came Jeb Stuart with two hundred cavalrymen. The smoke was very
thick; it was not with ease that one told friend from foe. In the
instant of encounter the _beau sabreur_ thought that he spoke to
Confederates. He made his horse to bound, he rose in his stirrups, he
waved his plumed hat, he shouted aloud in his rich and happy voice,
"Don't run, boys! We are here!" To his disappointment the magic fell
short. The "boys" ran all the faster. Behind him, a trooper lifted his
voice. "They're not ours! They're Yankees! Charge them, sir, charge!"
Stuart charged.
Along the crest of the Henry Hill the kneeling ranks of the First
Brigade fired and loaded and fired again. Men and horses fell around the
guns of Ricketts and Griffin, but the guns were not silenced. Rockbridge
and Loudoun and their fellows answered with their Virginia Military
Institute six-pounders, with their howitzers, with their one or two
Napoleons, but Ricketts and Griffin held fast. The great shells came
hurtling, death screaming its message and sweeping the pine wood. The
stone wall suffered; here and there the units dropped from place.
Jackson, holding up his wounded hand, came to the artillery. "Get these
guns out of my way. I am going to give them the bayonet." The bugler put
the bugle to his lips. The guns limbered up, moving out by the right
flank and taking position elsewhere upon the plateau. Jackson returned
to his troops. "Fix bayonets! Now, men, charge and take those
batteries!"
The First Brigade rose from beneath the pines. It rose, it advanced
between the moving guns, it shouted. The stone wall became an avalanche,
and started down the slope. It began crescent-wise, for the pine wood
where it had lain curved around Ricketts and Griffin like a giant's
half-closed hand. From the finger nearest the doomed batteries sprang
the 33d Virginia. In the dust of the field all uniforms were now of one
neutral hue. Griffin trained his guns upon the approaching body, but his
chief stopped him. "They're our own, man!--a supporting regiment!" The
33d Virginia came on, halted at two hundred feet, and poured upon the
batteries a withering fire. Alas for Ricketts and Griffin, brave men
handling brave guns! Their cannoneers fell, and the scream of their
horses shocked the field. Ricketts was badly wounded; his lieutenant Ramsay
lay dead. The stone wall blazed again. The Federal infantry supporting
the guns broke and fled in confusion. Other regiments--Michigan
and Minnesota this time--came up the hill. A grey-haired
officer--Heintzleman--seated sideways in his saddle upon a
hillock, appealing, cheering, commanding, was conspicuous for his
gallant bearing. The 33d, hotly pushed, fell back into the curving wood,
only to emerge again and bear down upon the prize of the guns. The whole
of the First Brigade was now in action and the plateau of the Henry Hill
roared like the forge of Vulcan when it welded the armour of Mars. It
was three in the afternoon of midmost July. There arose smoke and shouts
and shrieks, the thunder from the Mathews Hill of the North's uncrippled
artillery, and from the plateau the answering thunder of the Southern,
with the under song, incessant, of the muskets. Men's tongues clave to
the roofs of their mouths, the sweat streamed forth, and the sweat
dried, black cartridge marks were about their lips, and their eyes felt
metallic, heated balls distending the socket. There was a smell of
burnt cloth, of powder, of all heated and brazen things, indescribable,
unforgettable, the effluvia of the battlefield. The palate savoured
brass, and there was not a man of those thousands who was not
thirsty--oh, very, very thirsty! Time went in waves with hollows between
of negation. A movement took hours--surely we have been at it since last
year! Another passed in a lightning flash. We were there beneath the
pines, on the ground red-breeched Zouaves and United States Marines,
above us a noisy shell, the voice of the general coming dry and far like
a grasshopper's through the din--we are here in a trampled flower
garden, beside the stumps of locust trees, in the midst of yells and
trampling, hands again upon the guns! There was no time between. The men
who were left of Ricketts and Griffin fought well; they were brave
fighters. The 2d Wisconsin came up the hill, then the 79th and 69th New
York. An impact followed that seemed to rock the globe. Wisconsin and
New York retired whence they came, and it was all done in a moment.
Other regiments took their places. McDowell was making a frontal attack
and sending in his brigades piecemeal. The plateau was uneven; low
ridges, shallow hollows, with clumps of pine and oak; one saw at a time
but a segment of the field. The nature of the ground split the troops as
with wedges; over all the Henry Hill the fighting now became from hand
to hand, in the woods and in the open, small squad against small squad.
That night a man insisted that this phase had lasted twelve hours. He
said that he remembered how the sun rose over the Henry House, and how,
when it went down, it left a red wall behind a gun on the Mathews
Hill--and he had seen both events from a ring of pines out of which he,
with two others, was keeping twenty Rhode Islanders.
Ricketts and Griffin, forty men upon the ground, twice that number of
horses dead or disabled, tried to drag away the guns. Down upon them
roared the 65th, no alignment, broken and fierce as a mountain torrent,
as Thunder Run when the rains were out and the snows had melted. It took
again the guns; it met a regiment from the Northwest, also stark
fighters and hunters, and turned it back; it seized the guns and drew
them toward the pine wood. On the other side Howard's Brigade came into
action, rising, a cloud of stinging bees, over the ridge. Maine and
Vermont fell into line, fired, each man, twenty rounds. The First
Brigade answered at close range. All the Henry plateau blazed and
thundered.
From headquarters at the Lewis House a most able mind had directed the
several points of entrance into battle of the troops drawn from the
lower fords. The 8th, the 18th, and 28th Virginia, Cash and Kershaw of
Bonham's, Fisher's North Carolina--each had come at a happy moment and
had given support where support was most needed. Out of the southeast
arose a cloud of dust, a great cloud as of many marching men. It moved
rapidly. It approached at a double quick, apparently it had several guns
at trail. Early had not yet come up from Union Mills; was it Early?
Could it be--_could it be from Manassas_? _Could it be the missing
brigade?_ Beauregard, flashing across the plateau like a meteor, lifted
himself in his stirrups, raised with a shaking hand his field-glasses to
his eyes. Stonewall Jackson held higher his wounded hand, wrapped in a
handkerchief no longer white. "It ain't for the pain,--he's praying,"
thought the orderly by his side. Over on the left, guarding that flank,
Jeb Stuart, mounted on a hillock, likewise addressed the heavens. "Good
Lord, I hope it's Elzey! Oh, good Lord, let it be Elzey!" The 49th
Virginia was strung behind a rail fence, firing from between the grey
bars. "Extra Billy," whose horse had been shot an hour before, suddenly
appeared in an angle erect upon the topmost rails. He gazed, then turned
and harangued. "Didn't I tell you, boys? Didn't I say that the old
Manassas Gap ain't half so black as she's painted? The president of that
road is my friend, gentlemen, and a better man never mixed a julep! The
old Manassas Gap's got them through! It's a road to be patronized,
gentlemen! The old Manassas Gap--"
A hand plucked at his boot. "For the Lord's sake, governor, come down
from there, or you'll be travelling on the Angels' Express!"
The dust rose higher; there came out of it a sound, a low, hoarse din.
Maine and Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, New York and Rhode
Island, saw and heard. There was a waver as of grain beneath wind over
the field, then the grain stood stiff against the wind, and all the
muskets flamed again.
The lost brigade of the Army of the Shenandoah, seventeen hundred
infantry and Beckham's Battery swept by the Lewis House, received
instructions from Johnston in person, and advanced against the enemy's
right flank. Kirby Smith led them. Heated, exhausted, parched with
thirst, the regiments came upon the plateau. Not till then did they see
the enemy, the awaited, the dreamed-of foe, the giant whose voice they
had heard at Manassas. They saw him now, and they yelled recognition.
From a thousand dusty throats came a cry, involuntary, individual,
indescribably fierce, a high and shrill and wild expression of anger
and personal opinion. There was the enemy. They saw him, they
yelled,--without premeditation, without cooperation, each man for
himself, _Yaai, Yai ... Yaai, Yaai, Yai.... Yaai!_ That
cry was to be heard on more than two thousand battlefields.
It lasts with the voice of Stentor, and with the horn of Roland.
It has gone down to history as the "Rebel yell."
As they reached the oak woods Kirby Smith was shot. Desperately wounded,
he fell from his horse. Elzey took command; the troops swept out by the
Chinn House upon the plateau. Beckham's battery unlimbered and came,
with decisive effect, into action.
McDowell, with a last desperate rally, formed a line of battle, a
gleaming, formidable crescent, half hid by a cloud of skirmishers. Out
of the woods by the Chinn House now came Jubal Early, with Kemper's 7th
Virginia, Harry Hays's Louisianians, and Barksdale's 13th Mississippi.
They took position under fire and opened upon the enemy's right. As they
did so Elzey's brigade, the 10th Virginia, the 1st Maryland, the 3d
Tennessee, the 8th and 2d South Carolina, the 18th and 28th Virginia,
and Hampton's and Cary's legions charged. The First Brigade came down