The Long Roll
shells burst and showered ruin. There came into Allan's mind a picture
in the old geography,--rocks thrown up by Vesuvius. He thought he was
speaking to the geography class. "I'll show you how they look. I was
lying, you see, at the edge of the crater, and they were all overhead."
The picture passed away, and he began to think that the minies'
unearthly shriek was much like the winter wind round Thunder Run
Mountain--Sairy and Tom--Was Sairy baking gingerbread?--Of course not;
they didn't have gingerbread now. Besides, you didn't want gingerbread
when you were thirsty.... _Oh, water, water, water, water!..._ Tom might
be taking the toll--if there was anybody to pay it, and if they kept the
roads up. Roses in bloom, and the bees in them and over the pansies....
The wrens sang, and Christianna came down the road. Roses and pansies,
with their funny little faces, and Sairy's blue gingham apron and the
blue sky. The water-bucket on the porch, with the gourd. He began to
mutter a little. "Time to take in, children--didn't you hear the bell? I
rang it loudly. I am ringing it now. Listen! Loud, loud--like church
bells--and cannons. The old lesson.... Curtius and the gulf."
In the next onrush a man stumbled and came to his knees beside him. Not
badly hurt, he was about to rise. Allan caught his arm. "For God's
sake--if you've got any water--" The man, a tall Alabamian, looked down,
nodded, jerked loose another U. S. canteen, and dropped it into the
other's hand. "All right, all right--not at all--not at all--" He ran
on, joining the hoar and shouting wave. Allan, the flask set to his
lips, found not water, but a little cold and weak coffee. It was
nectar--it was happiness--it was life--though he could have drunk ten
times the amount!
The cool draught and the strength that was in it revived him, drew his
wandering mind back from Thunder Run to Gaines's Mill. Again he wished
to know where was the Army of the Valley. It might be over there, in the
smoke pall, turning Fitz John Porter's right ... but he did not believe
it. Brigade after brigade had swept past him, had been broken, had
reformed, had again swept by into the wood that was so thick with the
dead. A. P. Hill continued to hurl them in, standing, magnificent
fighter! his eyes on the dark and bristling stronghold. On the hill,
behind the climbing breastworks and the iron giants atop, Fitz John
Porter, good and skilful soldier, withdrew from the triple lines his
decimated regiments, put others in their places, scoured with the hail
of his twenty-two batteries the plain of the Confederate centre. All the
attack was here--all the attack was here--and the grey brigades were
thinning like mist wreaths. The dead and wounded choked field and gully
and wood and swamp. Allan struck his hands together. What had
happened--what was the matter? How long had he lain here? Two hours, at
the least--and always it was A. P. Hill's battle, and always the grey
brigades with a master courage dashed themselves against the slope of
fire, and always the guns repelled them. It was growing late. The sun
could not be seen. Plain and woods were darkening, darkening and filled
with groaning. It was about him like a melancholy wind, the groaning. He
raised himself on his hands and saw how many indeed were scattered in
the sedge, or in the bottom of the yellow gully, or slanted along its
sides. He had not before so loudly heard the complaining that they made,
and for a moment the brain wondered why. Then he was aware that the air
was less filled with missiles, that the long musketry rattle and the
baying of the war dogs was a little hushed. Even as he marked this the
lull grew more and more perceptible. He heard the moaning of the
wounded, because now the ear could take cognizance.
The shadow deepened. A horse, with a blood-stained saddle, unhurt
himself, approached him, stood nickering for a moment, then panic-struck
again, lashed out with his heels and fled. All the plain, the sedge
below, the rolling canopy above, was tinged with reddish umber. The
sighing wind continued, but the noise of firing died and died. For all
the moaning of the wounded, there seemed to fall a ghastly silence.
Over Allan came a feeling as of a pendulum forever stopped, as of Time
but a wreck on the shore of Space, and Space a deserted coast, an
experiment of some Power who found it ineffective and tossed it away.
The Now and Here, petrified forever, desolate forever, an obscure bubble
in the sea of being, a faint tracing on the eternal Mind to be overlaid
and forgotten--here it rested, and would rest. The field would stay and
the actors would stay, both forever as they were, standing, lying, in
motion or at rest, suffering, thirsting, tasting the sulphur and feeling
the heat, held here forever in a vise, grey shadows suffering like
substance, knowing the lost battle.... A deadly weakness and horror came
over him. "O God!--Let us die--"
From the rear, to A. P. Hill's right, where was Longstreet, broke a faint
yelling. It grew clearer, came nearer. From another direction--from the
left--burst a like sound, increasing likewise, high, wild, and clear. Like
a breath over the field went the conviction--_Jackson--Jackson at last!_
Allan dropped in the broom sedge, his arm beneath his head. The grey sleeve
was wet with tears. The pendulum was swinging; he was home in the dear and
dread world.
The sound increased; the earth began to shake with the tread of men; the
tremendous guns began again their bellowing. Longstreet swung into
action, with the brigades of Kemper, Anderson, Pickett, Willcox, Pryor,
and Featherstone. On the left, with his own division, with Ewell's, with
D. H. Hill's, Jackson struck at last like Jackson. Whiting, with two
brigades, should have been with Jackson, but, missing his way in the
wood, came instead to Longstreet, and with him entered the battle. The
day was descending. All the plain was smoky or luridly lit; a vast
Shield of Mars, with War in action. With Longstreet and with Jackson up
at last, Lee put forth his full strength. Fifty thousand men in grey,
thirty-five thousand men in blue, were at once engaged--in three hundred
years there had been in the Western Hemisphere no battle so heavy as
this one. The artillery jarred even the distant atmosphere, and the high
mounting clouds were tinged with red. Six miles away, Richmond listened
aghast.
Allan forgot his wounds, forgot his thirst, forgot the terror, sick and
cold, of the minute past. He no longer heard the groaning. The storm of
sound swept it away. He was a fighter with the grey; all his soul was in
the prayer. "Let them come! Let them conquer!" He thought, _Let the war
bleed and the mighty die_. He saw a charge approaching. Willingly would
he have been stamped into the earth would it further the feet on their
way. The grey line hung an instant, poised on the further rim of the
gully, then swept across and onward. Until the men were by him, it was
thick night, thick and stifling. They passed. He heard the yelling as
they charged the slope, the prolonged tremendous rattle of musketry, the
shouts, the foiled assault, and the breaking of the wave. Another came,
a wall of darkness in the closing day. Over it hung a long cloud,
red-stained. Allan prayed aloud. "O God of Battles--O God of Battles--"
The wave came on. It resolved itself into a moving frieze, a wide battle
line of tall men, led by a tall, gaunt general, with blue eyes and
flowing, tawny hair. In front was the battle-flag, red ground and blue
cross. Beside it dipped and rose a blue flag with a single star. The
smoke rolled above, about the line. Bursting overhead, a great shell lit
all with a fiery glare. The frieze began to sing.
"The race is not to them that's got
The longest legs to run,
Nor the battle to that people
That shoots the biggest gun--"
Allan propped himself upon his hands. "Fourth Texas! Fourth
Texas!--Fourth--"
The frieze rushed down the slope of the gully, up again, and on. A foot
came hard on Allan's hand. He did not care. He had a vision of keen,
bronze faces, hands on gun-locks. The long, grey legs went by him with a
mighty stride. Gun-barrel and bayonet gleamed like moon on water. The
battle-flag with the cross, the flag with the single star, spread red
and blue wings. Past him they sped, gigantic, great ensigns of desperate
valour, war goddesses, valkyries, ... rather the great South herself,
the eleven States, Rio Grande to Chesapeake, Potomac to the Gulf! All
the shells were bursting, all the drums were thundering--
The Texans passed, he sank prone on the earth. Other waves he knew were
following--all the waves! Jackson with Ewell, Longstreet, the two Hills.
He thought he saw his own brigade--saw the Stonewall. But it was in
another quarter of the field, and he could not call to it. All the earth
was rocking like a cradle, blindly swinging in some concussion and
conflagration as of world systems.
As dusk descended, the Federal lines were pierced and broken. The Texans
made the breach, but behind them stormed the other waves,--D. H. Hill,
Ewell, the Stonewall Brigade, troops of Longstreet. They blotted out the
triple breastworks; from north, west, and south they mounted in thunder
upon the plateau. They gathered to themselves here twenty-two guns, ten
thousand small arms, twenty-eight hundred prisoners. They took the
plateau. Stubbornly fighting, Fitz John Porter drew off his exhausted
brigades, plunged downward through the forest, toward the Chickahominy.
Across that river, all day long McClellan, with sixty-five thousand men,
had rested behind earthworks, bewildered by Magruder, demonstrating in
front of Richmond with twenty-eight thousand. Now, at the twelfth hour,
he sent two brigades, French and Meagher.
Night fell, black as pitch. The forest sprang dense, from miry soil. The
region was one where Nature set traps. In the darkness it was not easy
to tell friend from foe. Grey fired on grey, blue on blue. The blue
still pressed, here in disorder, here with a steady front, toward the
grapevine bridge across the Chickahominy. French and Meagher arrived to
form a strong rearguard. Behind, on the plateau, the grey advance
paused, uncertain in the darkness and in its mortal fatigue. Here, and
about the marshy creek and on the vast dim field beyond, beneath the
still hanging battle cloud, lay, of the grey and the blue, fourteen
thousand dead and wounded. The sound of their suffering rose like a
monotonous wind of the night.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE HEEL OF ACHILLES
The Stonewall Brigade, a unit in Jackson's advance, halted on the
plateau near the McGehee house. All was dark, all was confused. In the
final and general charge, regiments had become separated from brigades,
companies from regiments. Fragments of many commands were on the
plateau,--Whiting, Ewell, D. H. Hill, Jackson's own division, portions
of Longstreet's brigades, even a number of A. P. Hill's broken,
exhausted fighters. Many an officer lay silent or moaning, on the
scarped slope, in the terrific tangle about the creek, or on the
melancholy plain beyond. Captains shouted orders in the colonels'
places; lieutenants or sergeants in the captains'. Here, on the plateau,
where for hours the blue guns had thundered, the stars were seen but
dimly through the smoke. Bodies of men, and men singly or in twos and
threes, wandered like ghosts in Hades. "This way, Second Virginia!"
"Fall in here, Hood's Texans!"--"Hampton's men, over here!"--"Fifteenth
Alabama! Fifteenth Alabama!"--"I'm looking for the Milledgeville
Hornets."--"Iverson's men! Iverson's men!"--"Fall in here, Cary's
Legion!"--"First Maryland!"--"Fifth Virginia over here!"--"Where in hell