III
THE REIGN OF THE BRUTE
The noise of the guns rolled over the green hills into the little valleywhere the regiment had halted before a wayside spring, which lay hiddenbeneath a clump of rank pokeberry. As each company filled its canteens, itfiled across the sunny road, from which the dust rose like steam, and stoodresting in an open meadow that swept down into a hollow between two gentlyrising hills. From the spring a thin stream trickled, bordered by shortgrass, and the water, dashed from it by the thirsty men, gathered inshining puddles in the red clay road. By one of these puddles a man hadknelt to wash his face, and as Dan passed, draining his canteen, he lookedup with a sprinkling of brown drops on his forehead. Near him, unharmed bythe tramping feet, a little purple flower was blooming in the mud.
Dan gazed thoughtfully down upon him and upon the little purple flower inits dangerous spot. What did mud or dust matter, he questioned grimly, whenin a breathing space they would be in the midst of the smoke that hungclose above the hill-top? The sound of the cannon ceased suddenly, asabruptly as if the battery had sunk into the ground, and through the sunnyair he heard a long rattle that reminded him of the fall of hail on theshingled roof at Chericoke. As his canteen struck against his side, itseemed to him that it met the resistance of a leaden weight. There was alump in his throat and his lips felt parched, though the moisture from thefresh spring water was hardly dried. When he moved he was conscious ofstepping high above the earth, as he had done once at college after anover-merry night and many wines.
Straight ahead the sunshine lay hot and still over the smooth fields andthe little hollow where a brook ran between marshy banks. High above he sawit flashing on the gray smoke that hung in tatters from the tree-tops onthe hill.
An ambulance, drawn by a white and a bay horse, turned gayly from the roadinto the meadow, and he saw, with surprise, that one of the surgeons wastrimming his finger nails with a small penknife. The surgeon was a slightyoung man, with pointed yellow whiskers, and light blue eyes that squintedin the sunshine. As he passed he stifled a yawn with an elaborateaffectation of unconcern.
A man on horseback, with a white handkerchief tied above his collar,galloped up and spoke in a low voice to the Colonel. Then, as his horsereared, he glanced nervously about, grew embarrassed, and, with a sharpjerk of the bridle, galloped off again across the field. Presently othermen rode back and forth along the road; there were so many of them that Danwondered, bewildered, if anybody was left to make the battle beyond thehill.
The regiment formed into line and started at "double quick" across thebroad meadow powdered white with daisies. As it went into the ravine,skirting the hillside, a stream of men came toward it and passed slowly tothe rear. Some were on stretchers, some were stumbling in the arms ofslightly wounded comrades, some were merely warm and dirty and very muchafraid. One and all advised the fresh regiment to "go home and finishploughing." "The Yankees have got us on the hip," they declaredemphatically. "Whoopee! it's as hot as hell where you're going." Then aboy, with a blood-stained sleeve, waved his shattered arm in the air andlaughed deliriously. "Don't believe them, friends, it's glorious!" hecried, in the voice of the far South, and lurched forward upon the grass.
The sight of the soaked shirt and the smell of blood turned Dan faint. Hefelt a sudden tremor in his limbs, and his arteries throbbed dully in hisears. "I didn't know it was like this," he muttered thickly. "Why, they'reno better than mangled rabbits--I didn't know it was like this."
They wound through the little ravine, climbed a hillside planted in thincorn, and were ordered to "load and lie down" in a strip of woodland. Dantore at his cartridge with set teeth; then as he drove his ramrod home, ashell, thrown from a distant gun, burst in the trees above him, and a redflame ran, for an instant, along the barrel of his musket. He dodgedquickly, and a rain of young pine needles fell in scattered showers fromthe smoked boughs overhead. Somewhere beside him a man was groaning interror or in pain. "I'm hit, boys, by God, I'm hit this time." The groanschanged promptly into a laugh. "Bless my soul! the plagued thing went rightinto the earth beneath me."
"Damn you, it went into my leg," retorted a hoarse voice that fell suddenlysilent.
With a shiver Dan lay down on the carpet of rotted pine-cones and peered,like a squirrel, through the meshes of the brushwood. At first he saw onlygray smoke and a long sweep of briers and broom-sedge, standing out dimlyfrom an obscurity that was thick as dusk. Then came a clatter near at hand,and a battery swept at a long gallop across the thinned edge of the pines.So close it came that he saw the flashing white eyeballs and the spreadingsorrel manes of the horses, and almost felt their hot breath upon hischeek. He heard the shouts of the outriders, the crack of the stout whips,the rattle of the caissons, and, before it passed, he had caught theexcited gestures of the men upon the guns. The battery unlimbered, as hewatched it, shot a few rounds from the summit of the hill, and retreatedrapidly to a new position. When the wind scattered the heavy smoke, he sawonly the broom-sedge and several ridges of poor corn; some of the gauntstalks blackened and beaten to the ground, some still flaunting their bravetassels beneath the whistling bullets. It was all in sunlight, and the graysmoke swept ceaselessly to and fro over the smiling face of the field.
Then, as he turned a little in his shelter, he saw that there was a singleConfederate battery in position under a slight swell on his left. Beyond ithe knew that the long slope sank gently into a marshy stream and the broadturnpike, but the brow of the hill went up against the sky, and hidden inthe brushwood he could see only the darkened line of the horizon. Againstit the guns stood there in the sunlight, unsupported, solitary, majestic,while around them the earth was tossed up in the air as if a loose ploughhad run wild across the field. A handful of artillerymen moved back andforth, like dim outlines, serving the guns in a group of fallen horses thatshowed in dark mounds upon the hill. From time to time he saw a rammerwaved excitedly as a shot went home, or heard, in a lull, the hoarse voicesof the gunners when they called for "grape!"
As he lay there, with his eyes on the solitary battery, he forgot, for aninstant, his own part in the coming work. A bullet cut the air above him,and a branch, clipped as by a razor's stroke, fell upon his head; but hisnerves had grown steady and his thoughts were not of himself; he waswatching, with breathless interest, for another of the gray shadows at theguns to go down among the fallen horses.
Then, while he watched, he saw other batteries come out upon the hill; sawthe cannon thrown into position and heard the call change from "grape!" to"canister!" On the edge of the pines a voice was speaking, and beyond thevoice a man on horseback was riding quietly back and forth in the open.Behind him Jack Powell called out suddenly, "We're ready, Colonel Burwell!"and his voice was easy, familiar, almost affectionate.
"I know it, boys!" replied the Colonel in the same tone, and Dan felt aquick sympathy spring up within him. At that instant he knew that he lovedevery man in the regiment beside him--loved the affectionate Colonel, withthe sleepy voice, loved Pinetop, loved the lieutenant whose nose he hadbroken after drill.
At a word he had leaped, with the others, to his feet, and stood drawn upfor battle against the wood. Then it was that he saw the General of the dayriding beside fluttering colours across the waste land to the crest of thehill. He was rallying the scattered brigades about the flag--so the fighthad gone against them and gone badly, after all.
Around him the men drifted back, frightened, straggling, defeated, and thebroken ranks closed up slowly. The standards dipped for a moment before asharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds,soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.
It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against thepines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered amountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. Heheard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and thecrackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacingboughs. The old
childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his madrush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the woodedtwilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the openthat he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.
Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped hismusket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and herepeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Onceagain, when he stood on the trampled broom-sedge, he said them over with anervous jerk, "Wait until they come within fifty yards--and, for God'ssake, boys, shoot at the knees!"
He thought of the jolly Colonel, and laughed hysterically. Why, he had beenat that man's wedding--had kissed his bride--and now he was begging him toshoot at people's knees!
With a cheer, the regiment broke from cover and swept forward toward thesummit of the hill. Dan's foot caught in a blackberry vine, and he stumbledblindly. As he regained himself a shell ripped up the ground before him,flinging the warm clods of earth into his face. A "worm" fence at a littledistance scattered beneath the fire, and as he looked up he saw the longrails flying across the field. For an instant he hesitated; then somethingthat was like a nervous spasm shook his heart, and he was no more afraid.Over the blackberries and the broom-sedge, on he went toward the swirls ofgolden dust that swept upward from the bright green slope. If this was abattle, what was the old engraving? Where were the prancing horses and theuplifted swords?
Something whistled in his ears and the air was filled with sharp soundsthat set his teeth on edge. A man went down beside him and clutched at hisboots as he ran past; but the smell of the battle--a smell of oil andsmoke, of blood and sweat--was in his nostrils, and he could have kickedthe stiff hands grasping at his feet. The hot old blood of his fathers hadstirred again and the dead had rallied to the call of their descendant. Hewas not afraid, for he had been here long before.
Behind him, and beside him, row after row of gray men leaped from theshadow--the very hill seemed rising to his support--and it was almostgayly, as the dead fighters lived again, that he went straight onward overthe sunny field. He saw the golden dust float nearer up the slope, saw thebrave flags unfurling in the breeze--saw, at last, man after man emergefrom the yellow cloud. As he bent to fire, the fury of the game swept overhim and aroused the sleeping brute within him. All the primeval instincts,throttled by the restraint of centuries--the instincts of bloodguiltiness,of hot pursuit, of the fierce exhilaration of the chase, of the deathgrapple with a resisting foe--these awoke suddenly to life and turned thebattle scarlet to his eyes.
* * * * *
Two hours later, when the heavy clouds were smothering the sunset, he cameslowly back across the field. A gripping nausea had seized upon him--anausea such as he had known before after that merry night at college. Hishead throbbed, and as he walked he staggered like a drunken man. Therevulsion of his overwrought emotions had thrown him into a state ofsensibility almost hysterical.
The battle-field stretched grimly round him, and as the sunset was blottedout, a gray mist crept slowly from the west. Here and there he saw menlooking for the wounded, and he heard one utter an impatient "Pshaw!" as helifted a half-cold body and let it fall. Rude stretchers went by him oneither side, and still the field seemed as thickly sown as before; on theleft, where a regiment of Zouaves had been cut down, there was a flash ofwhite and scarlet, as if the loose grass was strewn with great tropicalflowers. Among them he saw the reproachful eyes of dead and dying horses.
Before him, on the gradual slope of the hill, stood a group of abandonedguns, and there was something almost human in the pathos of their utterisolation. Around them the ground was scorched and blackened, and scatteredover the broken trails lay the men who had fallen at their post. He sawthem lying there in the fading daylight, with the sponges and the rammersstill in their hands, and he saw upon each man's face the look with whichhe had met and recognized the end. Some were smiling, some staring, and onelay grinning as if at a ghastly joke. Near him a boy, with the hair stilldamp on his forehead, had fallen upon an uprooted blackberry vine, and thepurple stain of the berries was on his mouth. As Dan looked down upon him,the smell of powder and burned grass came to him with a wave of sickness,and turning he stumbled on across the field. At the first step his footstruck upon something hard, and, picking it up, he saw that it was a Minieball, which, in passing through a man's spine, had been transformed into amass of mingled bone and lead. With a gesture of disgust he dropped it andwent on rapidly. A stretcher moved beside him, and the man on it, shotthrough the waist, was saying in a whisper, "It is cold--cold--so cold."Against his will, Dan found, he had fallen into step with the men who borethe stretcher, and together they kept time to the words of the woundedsoldier who cried out ceaselessly that it was cold. On their way theypassed a group on horseback and, standing near it, a handsome artilleryman,who wore a red flannel shirt with one sleeve missing. As Dan went on hediscovered that he was thinking of the handsome man in the red shirt andwondering how he had lost his missing sleeve. He pondered the question asif it were a puzzle, and, finally, yielded it up in doubt.
Beyond the base of the hill they came into the small ravine which had beenturned into a rude field hospital. Here the stretcher was put down, and atired-looking surgeon, wiping his hands upon a soiled towel, came and kneltdown beside the wounded man.
"Bring a light--I can't see--bring a light!" he exclaimed irritably, as hecut away the clothes with gentle fingers.
Dan was passing on, when he heard his name called from behind, and turningquickly found Governor Ambler anxiously regarding him.
"You're not hurt, my boy?" asked the Governor, and from his tone he mighthave parted from the younger man only the day before.
"Hurt? Oh, no, I'm not hurt," replied Dan a little bitterly, "but there's awhole field of them back there, Colonel."
"Well, I suppose so--I suppose so," returned the other absently. "I'mlooking after my men now, poor fellows. A victory doesn't come cheap, youknow, and thank God, it was a glorious victory."
"A glorious victory," repeated Dan, looking at the surgeons who wereworking by the light of tallow candles.
The Governor followed his gaze. "It's your first fight," he said, "and youhaven't learned your lesson as I learned mine in Mexico. The best, or theworst of it, is that after the first fight it comes easy, my boy, it comestoo easy."
There was hot blood in him also, thought Dan, as he looked at him--and yetof all the men that he had ever known he would have called the Governor themost humane.
"I dare say--I'll get used to it, sir," he answered. "Yes, it was aglorious victory."
He broke away and went off into the twilight over the wide meadow to thelittle wayside spring. Across the road there was a field of clover, where afew campfires twinkled, and he hastened toward it eager to lie down in thedarkness and fall asleep. As his feet sank in the moist earth, he lookeddown and saw that the little purple flower was still blooming in the mud.