The Long Roll
by. Edward looked at his fingers. "Barrel burn them?" asked a neighbour.
"Reckon they use red-hot muskets in hell? Wish you could see your lips,
Edward! Round black O. Biting cartridges for a living--and it used to be
when you read Plutarch that you were all for the peaceful heroes! You
haven't a lady-love that would look at you now!
"'Take, oh, take those lips away
That so blackly are enshrined--'
Here comes a lamp-post--a lamp-post--a lamp-post!"
The gunboats on the river threw the "lamp-posts." The long and horrible
shells arrived with a noise that was indescribable. A thousand shrieking
rockets, perhaps, with at the end an explosion and a rain of fragments
like rocks from Vesuvius. They had a peculiar faculty for getting on the
nerves. The men watched their coming with something like shrinking, with
raised arms and narrowed eyes. "Look out for the lamp-post--look out for
the lamp-post--look out--Aaahhhh!"
Before long the regiment was moved a hundred yards nearer the
wheat-field. Here it became entangled in the ebb of a charge--the
brigade which had rushed by coming back, piecemeal, broken and driven by
an iron flail. It would reform and charge again, but now there was
confusion. All the field was confused, dismal and dreadful, beneath the
orange-tinted smoke. The smoke rolled and billowed, a curtain of strange
texture, now parting, now closing, and when it parted disclosing
immemorial Death and Wounds with some attendant martial pageantry. The
commands were split as by wedges, the uneven ground driving them
asunder, and the belching guns. They went up to hell mouth, brigade by
brigade, even regiment by regiment, and in the breaking and reforming
and twilight of the smoke, through the falling of officers and the
surging to and fro, the troops became interwoven, warp of one division,
woof of another. The sound was shocking; when, now and then there fell a
briefest interval it was as though the world had stopped, had fallen
into a gulf of silence.
Edward Cary found beside him a man from another regiment, a small,
slight fellow, young and simple. A shock of wheat gave both a moment's
protection. "Hot work!" said Edward, with his fine camaraderie. "You
made a beautiful charge. We almost thought you would take them."
The other looked at him vacantly. "I added up figures in the old
warehouse," he said, in a high, thin voice. "I added up figures in the
old warehouse, and when I went home at night I used to read plays. I
added up figures in the old warehouse--Don't you remember Hotspur? I
always liked him, and that part--
'To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon;
Or dive into the bottom of the deep--'"
He stood up. Edward rose to his knees and put out a hand to draw him
down. "It's enough to make you crazy, I'll confess--but you mustn't
stand up like that!"
The downward drawing hand was too late. There were blue sharpshooters in
a wood in front. A ball entered the clerk's breast and he sank down
behind the wheat. "I added up figures in the old warehouse," he again
told Cary, "and when I went home at night I read plays--"
The figure stiffened in Edward's grasp. He laid it down, and from behind
the wheat shock watched a grey battery in process of being knocked to
pieces. It had arrived in this quarter of the field in a wild gallop,
and with a happy insouciance had unlimbered and run up the guns back of
a little crest topped with sumach, taking pains meanwhile to assure the
infantry that now it was safe. The infantry had grinned. "Like you
first-rate, artillery! Willing to bet on the gunners, but the guns are a
_leetle_ small and few. Don't know that we feel so _awful_ safe!"
The grey began. Four shells flew up the long slope and burst among the
iron rows that made a great triple crown for Malvern Hill. The grey
gunners cheered, and the appreciative infantry cheered, and the first
began to reload while the second, flat in scrub and behind the wheat,
condescended to praise. "Artillery does just about as well as can be
expected! Awful old-fashioned arm--but well-meaning.... Look
out--look... Eeehhh!"
The iron crown that had been blazing toward other points of the compass
now blazed toward this. Adversity came to the insouciant grey battery,
adversity quickening to disaster. The first thunder blast thickened to a
howling storm of shrapnel, grape, and canister.
At the first gun gunner No. 1, ramming home a charge, was blown into
fragments; at the second the arm holding the sponge staff was severed
from gunner No. 3's shoulder. A great shell, bursting directly over the
third, killed two men and horribly mangled others; the carriage of the
fourth was crushed and set on fire. This in the beginning of the storm;
as it swelled, total destruction threatened from the murk. The captain
went up and down. "Try it a little longer, men. Try it a little longer,
men. We've got to make up in quality, you know. We've got to make up in
quality, you know. Marse Robert's looking--I see him over there! Try it
a little longer--try it a little longer."
An aide arrived. "For God's sake, take what you've got left away! Yes,
it's an order. Your being massacred won't help. Look out--Look--"
No one in battle ever took account of time or saw any especial reason
for being, now here, and now in quite a different place, or ever knew
exactly how the places had been exchanged. Edward was practically
certain that he had taken part in a charge, that his brigade had driven
a body of blue infantry from a piece of woods. At any rate they were no
longer in the wheat field, but in a shady wood, where severed twigs and
branches floated pleasantly down. Lying flat, chin on hand, he watched a
regiment storm and take a thick abattis--felled trees filled with
sharpshooters--masking a hastily thrown up earthwork. The regiment was
reserving its fire and losing heavily. An elderly man led it, riding a
large old steady horse. "That's Ex-Governor Smith," said the regiment in
the wood. "That's Extra Billy! He's a corker! Next time he runs he's
going to get all the votes--"
The regiment tried twice to pass the abattis, but each time fell back.
The brigadier had ordered it not to fire until it was past the trees; it
obeyed, but sulkily enough. Men were dropping; the colour-bearer went
down. There was an outcry. "Colonel! we can't stand this! We'll all get
killed before we fire a shot! The general don't know how we're fixed--"
Extra Billy agreed with them. He rose in his stirrups, turned and nodded
vigorous assent. "Of course you can't stand it, boys! You oughtn't to be
expected to. It's all this infernal tactics and West P'int tomfoolery!
Damn it, fire! and flush the game!"
Edward laughed. From the fuss it was apparent that the abattis and
earthwork had succumbed. At any rate, the old governor and his regiment
were gone. He was of the colour-guard, and all the colour-guard were
laughing. "Didn't you ever see him go into battle with his old blue
umbrella up! Trotting along same as to a caucus--whole constituency
following! Fine old political Roman! Look out, Yedward! Whole pine tree
coming down."
The scene changed again, and it was the side of a ravine, with a fine
view of the river and with Morell and Couch blazing somewhere above. The
shells went overhead, bellowing monsters charging a grey battery on a
hillock and a distant line of troops. "That's Pegram--that battery,"
said some one. "He does well." "Has any one any idea of the time?" asked
another. "Sun's so hidden there's no guessing. Don't believe we'll ever
see his blessed light again."
A fisherman from the Eastern Shore stated that it was nearly five
o'clock. "Fogs can't fool me. Day's drawing down, and tide's going
out--"
The lieutenant-colonel appeared. "Somebody with an order has been shot,
coming through the cornfield toward us. Three volunteers to bring him
in!"
Edward and the Eastern Shore man and a lean and dry and middle-aged
lawyer from King and Queen bent their heads beneath their shoulders and
plunged into the corn. All the field was like a miniature abattis,
stalk and blade shot down and crossed and recrossed in the wildest
tangle. To make way over it was difficult enough, and before the three
had gone ten feet the minies took a hand. The wounded courier lay
beneath his horse, and the horse screamed twice, the sound rising above
the roar of the guns. A ball pierced Edward's cap, another drew blood
from the lawyer's hand. The fisherman was a tall and wiry man; as he ran
he swayed like a mast in storm. The three reached the courier, dragged
him from beneath the horse, and found both legs crushed. He looked at
them with lustreless eyes. "You can't do anything for me, boys. The
general says please try to take those three guns up there. He's going to
charge the line beyond, and they are in the way."
"All right, we will," said the lawyer. "Now you put one arm round Cary's
neck and one round mine--"
But the courier shook his head. "You leave me here. I'm awful tired. You
go take the guns instead. Ain't no use, I tell you. I'd like to see the
children, but--"
In the act of speaking, as they lifted him, a ball went through his
throat. The three laid the body down, and, heads bent between shoulders,
ran over and through the corn toward the ravine. Two thirds of the way
across, the fisherman was shot. He came to his knees and, in falling,
clutched Edward. "Mast's overboard," he cried, in a rattling voice. "Cut
her loose, damn you!--I'll take the helm--" He, too, died. Cary and the
lawyer got back to the gully and gave the order.
The taking of those guns was no simple matter. It resembled child's play
only in the single-mindedness and close attention which went to its
accomplishment. The regiment that reached them at last and took them, and
took what was left of the blue gunners, was not much more than half a
regiment. The murk up here on this semi-height was thick to choking; the
odour and taste of the battle poisoned brass on the tongue, the colour that
of a sand storm, the heat like that of a battleship in action, and all the
place shook from the thunder and recoil of the tiers of great guns beyond,
untaken, not to be taken. A regiment rushed out of the rolling smoke, by
the half regiment. "Mississippi! Mississippi!--Well, even Mississippi isn't
going to do the impossible!" As the line went by, tall and swinging and
yelling itself hoarse, the colonel was wounded and fell. The charge went on
while the officer--he was an old man, very stately looking--dragged himself
aside, and sitting in the sedge tied a large bright handkerchief above a
wound in his leg. The charge dashed itself against the hillside, and the
tier of guns flamed a death's sickle and mowed it down. Breathless, broken,
the regiment fell back. When it reached the old man with the bright
handkerchief, it would have lifted him and carried him with it to the rear.
He would not go. He said, "Tell the 21st they can't get me till they take
those guns!"
The 21st mended its gaps and charged again. The old man set his hat on
his sword, waved it in the air, and cheered his men as they passed. They
passed him but to return. To go up against those lines of bellowing guns
was mere heroic madness. Bleeding, exhausted, the men put out their
hands for the old man. He drew his revolver. "I'll shoot anybody who
touches me! Tell the 21st they can't get their colonel till they take
those guns!"
The 21st charged a third time, in vain. It came back--a part of it came
back. The old man had fainted, and his men lifted and bore him away.
From the platform where he lay in the shadow of the three guns Edward
Cary looked out over Malvern Hill, the encompassing lowland, marsh and
forest and fields, the winding Turkey Creek and Western Creek, and to