Read Before the Dawn: A Story of the Fall of Richmond Page 17

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE WILDERNESS

  There is in Virginia a grim and sterile region the name of which noAmerican ever hears without a shudder. When you speak to him of theWilderness, the phantom armies rise before him and he hears the thunderof the guns as the vast struggle sweeps through its shades. He sees,too, the legions of the dead strewn in the forest, a mighty host, and hesighs to think so many of his countrymen should have fallen in mutualstrife.

  It is a land that deserves its name. Nature there is cold and stern. Therock crops up and the thin red soil bears only scrub forest and wearybushes. All is dark, somber and lonely, as if the ghosts of the fallenhad claimed it for their playground.

  The woodchopper seeks his hut early at night, and builds high the firefor the comfort of the blaze. He does not like to wander in the darkover the ground where vanished armies fought and bled so long. He seesand hears too much. He knows that his time--the present--has passed withthe day, and that when the night comes it belongs again to the armies;then they fight once more, though the battle is soundless now, amid theshades and over the hills and valleys.

  Now and then he turns from the fire and its comradeship and looksthrough the window into the darkness. He, too, shudders as he thinks ofthe past and remembers the long roll, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness,Spottsylvania and the others. Even the poor woodchopper knows that thismelancholy tract of ground has borne more dead men's bones than anyother of which history tells, and now and then he asks why, but no onecan give him the answer he wishes. They say only that the battles werefought, that here the armies met for the death struggle which both knewwas coming and which came as they knew.

  The Wilderness has changed but little in the generation since Grant andLee met there. The sullen soil is sullen and unyielding still. As of oldit crops up here in stone and there turns a thin red tint to the sun.The sassafras bushes and the scrub oaks moan sadly in the wind, and fewhuman beings wander over the desolate hills and valleys.

  At Gettysburg there is a city, and the battlefield is covered withmonuments in scores and scores, and all the world goes to see them. Thewhite marble and granite shafts and pillars and columns, the green hillsand fields around, the sunshine and the sound of many voices arecheerful and tell of life; you are not with the dead--you are simplywith the glories of the past.

  But it is different when you come to the Wilderness. Here you reallywalk with ghosts. There are no monuments, no sunshine, no green grass,no voices; all is silent, somber and lonely, telling of desolation anddecay. To many it is a more real monument than the clustering shafts ofGettysburg. All this silence, all this abandonment tell in solemn andmajestic tones that here not one great battle was fought, but many; thathere in one year shone the most brilliant triumph of the South; andhere, in another year, she fought her death struggle.

  When you walk among the bushes and the scrub oaks and listen to thedesolate wind you need no inscription to tell you that you are in theWilderness.