The Long Roll
by a magnet, crept through a finger of sumach and sassafras,
outstretched from the wood, to a better vantage point just in rear of
the battery.
Behind him, through the woods, came a clatter of horses' hoofs. It was
met and followed by cheering. Turning his head, he saw a general and his
staff, and though he had never seen Lee he knew that this was Lee, and
himself began to cheer. The commander-in-chief lifted his grey hat, came
down the dim, overarched, aisle-like road, between the cheering troops.
With his staff he left the wood for the open, riding beneath the shelter
by the finger of sumach and sassafras, toward the battery. He saw Allan,
and reined up iron-grey Traveller. "You do not belong to this
regiment.--A scout? General Jackson's?--Ah, well, I expect General
Jackson to strike those people on the right any moment now!" He rode up
to the battery. The shells were raining, bursting above, around. In the
shelter of the hill the battery horses had at first, veteran,
undisturbed, cropped the parched grass, but now one was wounded and now
another. An arm was torn from a gunner. A second, stooping over a limber
chest, was struck between the shoulders, crushed, flesh and bone, into
pulp. The artillery captain came up to the general-in-chief. "General
Lee, won't you go away? Gentlemen, won't you tell him that there's
danger?"
The staff reinforced the statement, but without avail. General Lee shook
his head, and with his field-glasses continued to gaze toward the left,
whence should arise the dust, the smoke, the sound of Jackson's flanking
movement. There was no sign on the left, but here, in the centre, the
noise from the woods beyond the creek was growing infernal. He lowered
the glass. "Captain Chamberlayne, will you go tell General Longstreet--"
Out of the thunder-filled woods, back from creek and swamp and briar and
slashing, from abattis of bough and log, from the shadow of that bluff
head with its earthworks one above the other, from the scorching flame
of twenty batteries and the wild singing of the minies, rushed the South
Carolina troops. The brigadier--Maxey Gregg--the regimental, the company
officers, with shouts, with appeals, with waved swords, strove to stop
the rout. The command rallied, then broke again. Hell was in the wood,
and the men's faces were grey and drawn. "We must rally those troops!"
said Lee, and galloped forward. He came into the midst of the disordered
throng. "Men, men! Remember your State--Do your duty!" They recognized
him, rallied, formed on the colours, swept past him with a cheer and
reentered the deep and fatal wood.
The battery in front of Allan began to suffer dreadfully. The horses
grew infected with the terror of the plain. They jerked their heads
back; they neighed mournfully; some left the grass and began to gallop
aimlessly across the field. The shells came in a stream, great, hurtling
missiles. Where they struck flesh or ploughed into the earth, it was
with a deadened sound; when they burst in air, it was like crackling
thunder. The blue sky was gone. A battle pall wrapped the thousands and
thousands of men, the guns, the horses, forest, swamp, creeks, old
fields; the great strength of the Federal position, the grey brigades
dashing against it, hurled back like Atlantic combers. It should be
about three o'clock, Allan thought, but he did not know. Every nerve was
tingling, the blood pounding in his veins. Time and space behaved like
waves charged with strange driftwood. He felt a mad excitement, was sure
that if he stood upright or tried to walk he would stagger. An order ran
down the line of the brigade he had adopted. _Attention!_
He found himself on his feet and in line, steady, clear of head as
though he trod the path by Thunder Run. _Forward! March!_ The brigade
cleared the wood, and in line of battle passed the exhausted battery.
Allan noted a soldier beneath a horse, a contorted, purple, frozen face
held between the brute's fore-legs. The air was filled with whistling
shells; the broom sedge was on fire. _Right shoulder. Shift Arms!
Charge!_
Somewhere, about halfway over the plain, he became convinced that his
right leg from the hip down was gone to sleep. He had an idea that he
was not keeping up. A line passed him--another; he mustn't let the
others get ahead! and for a minute he ran quite rapidly. There was a
yellow, rain-washed gulley before him; the charge swept down one side
and up the other. This crack in the earth was two thirds of the way
across the open; beyond were the wood, the creek, the abattis, the
climbing lines of breastworks, the thirty-five thousand in blue, and the
tremendous guns. The grey charge was yelling high and clear, preparing
to deliver its first fire; the air a roar of sound and a glaring light.
Allan went down one side of the gulley with some ease, but it was
another thing to climb the other. However, up he got, almost to the
top--and then pitched forward, clutching at the growth of sedge along
the crest. It held him steady, and he settled into a rut of yellow earth
and tried to think it over. Endeavouring to draw himself a little
higher, a minie ball went through his shoulder. The grey charge passed
him, roaring on to the shadowy wood.
He helped himself as best he could, staunched some blood, drew his own
conclusions as to his wounds. He was not suffering much; not over much.
By nature he matched increasing danger with increasing coolness. All
that he especially wanted was for that charge to succeed--for the grey
to succeed. His position here, on the rim of the gully, was an admirable
one for witnessing all that the shifting smoke might allow to be
witnessed. It was true that a keening minie or one of the monstrous
shells might in an instant shear his thread of life, probably would do
so; all the probabilities lay that way. But he was cool and courageous,
and had kept himself ready to go. An absorbing interest in the field of
Gaines's Mill, a passionate desire that Victory should wear grey,
dominated all other feeling. Half in the seam of the gully, half in the
sedge at the top, he made himself as easy as he could and rested a
spectator.
The battle smoke, now heavily settling, now drifting like clouds before
a wind, now torn asunder and lifting from the scene, made the great
field to come and go in flashes, or like visions of the night. He saw
that A. P. Hill was sending in his brigades, brigade after brigade. He
looked to the left whence should come Jackson, but over there, just seen
through the smoke, the forest stood sultry and still. Behind him,
however, in the wood at the base of the armed hill, there rose a clamour
and deep thunder as of Armageddon. Like a grey wave broken against an
iron shore, the troops with whom he had charged streamed back
disordered, out of the shadowy wood into the open, where in the gold
sedge lay many a dead man and many a wounded. Allan saw the crimson flag
with the blue cross shaken, held on high, heard the officers crying,
"Back, men, back! Virginians, do your duty!" The wave formed again. He
tried to rise so that he might go with it, but could not. It returned
into the wood. Before him, racing toward the gully, came another
wave--Branch's brigade, yelling as it charged. He saw it a moment like a
grey wall, with the colours tossing, then it poured down into the gully
and up and past him. He put up his arms to shield his face, but the men
swerved a little and did not trample him. The worn shoes, digging into
the loose earth covered him with dust. The moving grey cloth, the smell
of sweat-drenched bodies, of powder, of leather, of hot metal, the
panting breath, the creak and swing, the sudden darkening, heat and
pressure--the passage of that wave took his own breath from him, left
him white and sick. Branch went on. He looked across the gully and saw
another wave coming--Pender, this time. Pender came without yelling,
grim and grey and close-mouthed. Pender had suffered before Beaver Dam
Creek; to-day there was not much more than half a brigade. It, too,
passed, a determined wave. Allan saw Field in the distance coming up. He
was tormented with thirst. Three yards from the gully lay stretched the
trunk of a man, the legs blown away. He was almost sure he caught the
glint of a canteen. He lay flat in the sedge and dragged himself to the
corpse. There was the canteen, indeed; marked with a great U. S., spoil
taken perhaps at Williamsburg or at Seven Pines. It was empty, drained
dry as a bone. There was another man near. Allan dragged himself on. He
thought this one dead, too, but when he reached him he opened large blue
eyes and breathed, "Water!" Allan sorrowfully shook his head. The blue
eyes did not wink nor close, they glazed and stayed open. The scout
dropped beside the body, exhausted. Field's charge passed over him. When
he opened his eyes, this portion of the plain was like a sea between
cross winds. All the broken waves were wildly tossing. Here they
recoiled, fled, even across the gully; here they seethed, inchoate;
there, regathering form and might, they readvanced to the echoing hill,
with its three breastworks and its eighty cannon. Death gorged himself
in the tangled slashing, on the treacherous banks of the slow-moving
creek. A. P. Hill was a superb fighter. He sent in his brigades. They
returned, broken; he sent them in again. They went. The 16th and 22d
North Carolina passed the three lines of blazing rifles, got to the head
of the cliff, found themselves among the guns. In vain. Morrell's
artillerymen, Morrell's infantry, pushed them back and down, down the
hillside, back into the slashing. The 35th Georgia launched itself like
a thunderbolt and pierced the lines, but it, too, was hurled down.
Gregg's South Carolinians and Sykes Regulars locked and swayed. Archer
and Pender, Field and Branch, charged and were repelled, to charge
again. Save in marksmanship, the Confederate batteries could not match
the Federal; strength was with the great, blue rifled guns, and yet the
grey cannoneers wrought havoc on the plateau and amid the breastworks.
The sound was enormous, a complex tumult that crashed and echoed in the
head. The whole of the field existed in the throbbing, expanded
brain--all battlefields, all life, all the world and other worlds, all
problems solved and insoluble. The wide-flung grey battlefront was now
sickle-shaped, convex to the foe. The rolling dense smoke flushed
momently with a lurid glare. In places the forest was afire, in others
the stubble of the field. From horn to horn of the sickle galloped the
riderless horses. Now and again a wounded one among them screamed
fearfully.
Allan dragged himself back to the gully. It was safer there, because the
charging lines must lessen speed, break ranks a little; they would not
be so resistlessly borne on and over him. He was not light-headed, or he
thought he was not. He lay on the rim of the gully that was now trampled
into a mere trough of dust, and he looked at the red light on the
rolling vapour. Where it lifted he saw, as in a pageant, war in
mid-career. Sound, too, had organized. He could have beaten time to the
gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting,
breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder
and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the
allies man had devised,--the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had
made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the
solid shot, grape, canister, shrapnel, minie balls. The shells were
fearful, Allan was fain to acknowledge. They passed like whistling
winds. They filled the air like great rocks from a blasting. The
staunchest troops blanched a little, jerked the head sidewise as the