The Long Roll
he's got cousins with us. Says he'd as soon fight on one side as the
other."
"I can't very well fight nowhere," whined Steve. "If you'd be so good as
to look at my foot, sir--"
"I see. You deserted and they picked you up. Very well, Mr. Deserter, I
want some information and you're the man to give it to me."
Steve gave it without undue reluctance. "What in hell does it matter,
anyway?" he thought, "they'll find out damned quick anyhow about numbers
and that we aren't only Ewell. Gawd! Old Jack's struck them this very
minute! I hear the guns."
So did the company to which he had deserted. "Hell and damnation!
Artillery to shake the earth! Middletown. All the wagons to pass and the
cavalry.--It isn't just Ewell's division, he says. He says it's all of
them and Stonewall Jackson!--Take the fellow up somebody and bring him
along!--_Fours right! Forward!_"
Five minutes later they reached the pike, south of Middletown. It proved
a seething stream of horse and foot and wagon train, forms shadowy and
umber, moving in the whirling dust. Over all hung like a vast and black
streamer a sense of panic. Underneath it every horse was restive and
every voice had an edge. Steve gathered that there were teamsters who
wished to turn and go back to Strasburg. He saw wagon masters plying
long black whips about the shoulders of these unwilling; he heard
officers shouting. The guns ahead boomed out, and there came a cry of
"Ashby"! The next instant found him violently unseated and hurled into
the dust of the middle road, from which he escaped by rolling with all
the velocity of which he was capable into the depression at the side. He
hardly knew what had happened--there had been, he thought, a runaway
team dragging an ordnance wagon. He seemed to remember a moving
thickness in the all-pervading dust, and, visible for an instant, a
great U. S. painted on the wagon side. Then shouts, general
scatteration, some kind of a crash--He rubbed a bump upon his forehead,
large as a guinea hen's egg. "Gawd! I wish I'd never come into this here
world!"
The world was, indeed, to-day rather like a bad dream--like one of those
dim and tangled streams of things, strange and frightful, at once
grotesquely unfamiliar and sickeningly real, which one neighbours for a
time in sleep. Steve picked himself out of the ditch, being much in
danger, even there, of trampling hoofs or wagons gone amuck, and
attained, how he could not tell, a rank wayside clump of Jamestown weed
and pokeberry. In the midst of this he squatted, gathered into as small
a bunch as was physically possible. He was in a panic; the sweat cold
upon the back of his hands. Action or inaction in this world, sitting,
standing, or going seemed alike ugly and dangerous.
First of all, this world was blue-clad and he was dressed in grey. It
was in a wild hurry; the main stream striving somehow to gain
Middletown, which must be passed, hook or crook, aid of devil or aid of
saint, while a second current surged with increasing strength back
toward Strasburg. All was confusion. They would never stop to listen to
explanations as to a turned coat! Steve was sure that they would simply
shoot him or cut him down before he could say "I am one of you!" They
would kill him, like a stray bee in the hive, and go their way, one way
or the other, whichever way they were going! The contending motions made
him giddy.
An aide in blue, galloping madly from the front, encountered beside the
pokeberry clump an officer, directing, with his sword. Steve was morally
assured that they had seen him, had stopped, in short, to hale him
forth. As they did not--only excitedly shouted each at the other--he
drew breath again. He could see the two but dimly, close though they
were, because of the dust. Suddenly there came to him a rose-coloured
thought. That same veil must make him well-nigh invisible; more than
that, the dust lay so thickly on all things that colour in any uniform
was a debatable quality. He didn't believe anybody was noticing. The
extreme height to which his courage ever attained, was at once his. He
felt almost dare-devil.
The aide was shouting, so that he might be heard through the uproar.
"Where are the guns? Colonel Hatch says for the good Lord's sake hurry
them up! Hell's broke loose and occupied Middletown. Ashby's there, and
they say Jackson! They've planted guns--they've strung thousands of men
behind stone fences--they're using our own wagons for breastworks! The
cavalry was trying to get past. Listen to that!"
The other officer shouted also, waving his sword. "There's a battery
behind--Here it comes!--We ought to have started last night. The general
said he must develop the forces of the enemy--"
"He's developing them all right. Well, good-bye! Meet in Washington!"
The battery passed with uproar, clanging toward the front, scattering
men to either side like spray. Steve's wayside bower was invaded. "Get
out of here! This ain't no time to be sitting on your tail, thinking of
going fishing! G'lang!"
Steve went, covered with dust, the shade of the uniform below never
noticed in the furious excitement of the road. Life there was at fever
point, aware that death was hovering, and struggling to escape. In the
dust and uproar, the blare and panic, he was aware that he was moving
toward Middletown where they were fighting. Fighting was not precisely
that for which he was looking, and yet he was moving that way, and he
could not help it. The noise in front was frightful. The head of the
column of which he now formed an unwilling part, the head of the snake,
must be somewhere near Newtown, the rattling tail just out of Strasburg.
The snake was trying to get clear, trying to get out of the middle
Valley to Winchester, fifteen miles away. It was trying to drag its
painful length through the village just ahead. There were scorpions in
the village, on both sides the pike, on the hills above. Stonewall
Jackson with his old sabre, with his "Good! Good!" was hacking at the
snake, just there, in its middle. The old sabre had not yet cut quite
through, but there was hope--or fear--(the deserter positively did not
know which) that presently it would be done. A tall soldier, beside
whom, in the dream torrent, Steve found himself, began to talk. "Got any
water? No. Nobody has. I guess it's pouring down rain in New Bedford
this very minute! All the little streams running." He sighed. "'T ain't
no use in fussing. I don't remember to have ever seen you before, but
then we're all mixed up--"
"We are," said Steve. "Ain't the racket awful?"
"Awful. 'T is going to be like running the gauntlet, to run that town,
and we're most there. If I don't get out alive, and if you ever go to
New Bedford--Whoa, there! Look out!"
Steve, thrust by the press away from the pike into a Middletown street,
looked for a cellar door through which he might descend and be in
darkness. All the street was full of struggling forms. A man on
horseback, tall and horrible in the nightmare, cut at him with a sabre
as long as himself. Steve ducked, went under the horse's belly, and came
up to have a pistol shot take the cap from his head. With a yell he ran
beneath the second horse's arching neck. The animal reared; a third
horseman raised his carbine. There was an overturned Conestoga wagon in
the middle of the street, its white top like a bubble in all the wild
swirl and eddy of the place. Steve and the ball from the carbine passed
under the arch at the same instant, the bullet lodging somewhere in the
wagon bed.
Steve at first thought he might be dead, for it was cool and dark under
the tilted canvas, and there was a momentary effect of quietness. The
carbine had been fired; perhaps the bullet was in his brain. The
uncertainty held but a second; outside the fracas burst forth again, and
beneath him something moved in the straw. It proved to be the driver of
the wagon, wounded, and fallen back from the seat in front. He spoke now
in a curious, dreamy voice. "Get off the top of my broken leg--damn you
to everlasting hell!" Steve squirmed to one side. "Sorry. Gawd knows I
wish I wasn't any nearer it than the Peaks of Otter!" There was a
triangular tear in the canvas. He drew down the flap and looked out.
"They were Ashby's men--all those three!" He began to cry, though
noiselessly. "They hadn't ought to cut at me like that--shooting, too,
without looking! They ought to ha' seen I wasn't no damned Yank--" The
figure in the straw moved. Steve turned sick with apprehension. "Did you
hear what I said? I was just a-joking. Gawd! It's enough to make a man
wish he was a Johnny Reb--Hey, what did you say?"
But the figure in blue said nothing, or only some useless thing about
wanting water. Steve, reassured, looked again out of window. His refuge
lay a few feet from the pike, and the pike was a road through
pandemonium. He could see, upon a height, dimly, through the dust and
smoke the Rockbridge battery. Yellow flashes came from it, then
ear-splitting sound. A Federal force, horse, foot and guns, had hastily
formed in the opposite fields, seized a crest, planted cannon. These
sent screaming shells. In between the iron giants roared the
melee--Ashby jousting with Hatch's convoying cavalry--the Louisiana
troops firing in a long battle line, from behind the stone fences--a
horrible jam of wagons, overturned or overturning, panic-stricken mules,
drivers raving out oaths, using mercilessly long, snaky, black
whips--heat, dust, thirst and thunder, wild excitement, blood and death!
There were all manner of wagons. Ambulances were there with
inmates,--fantastic sickrooms, with glare for shade, Tartarean heat for
coolness, cannon thunder and shouting for quietness, grey enemies for
nursing women, and for home a battlefield in a hostile land. Heavy
ordnance wagons, far from the guns they were meant to feed, traces cut
and horses gone, rested reef-like for the tides to break against.
Travelling forges kept them company, and wagons bearing officers'
luggage. Beneath several the mules were pinned; dreadful sight could any
there have looked or pitied! Looming through there were the great supply
wagons, with others of lighter stores, holding boxes and barrels of
wines and fruits, commodities of all sorts, gold-leafed fripperies,
luxuries of all manner, poured across the Potomac for her soldiers by
the North. Sutlers' wagons did not lack, garishly stocked, forlorn as
Harlequin in the day's stress. In and around and over all these stranded
hulls roared the opposing forces. Steve saw Ashby, on the black
stallion, directing with a gauntleted hand. Four great draught horses,
drawing a loaded van, without a driver, maddened with fright, turned
into this street up and down which there was much fighting. A shout
arose. Carbines cracked. One of the leaders came down upon his knees.
The other slipped in blood and fell. The van overturned, pinning beneath
it one of the wheel horses. Its fall, immediately beside the Conestoga,
blocked Steve's window. He turned to crawl to the other side. As he did
so the wounded soldier in the straw had a remark to make. He made it in
the dreamy voice he had used before. "Don't you smell cloth burning?"
Steve did; in an instant saw it burning as well, first the corner of the
canvas cover, then the straw beneath. He gave a screech. "We're on fire!
Gawd! I've got to get out of this!"
The man in the straw talked dreamily on. "I got a bullet through the end
of my backbone. I can't sit up. I been lying here studying the scoop of
this here old wagon. It looks to me like the firmament at night, with
all the stars a-shining. There's no end of texts about stars. 'Like as
one star differeth from another--'" He began to cough. "There seems to
be smoke. I guess you'll have to drag me out, brother."