MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN
You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war; isit not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who startedout to do something in it, but didn't? Thousands entered the war, gotjust a taste of it, and then stepped out again, permanently. These, bytheir very numbers, are respectable, and are therefore entitled to asort of voice--not a loud one, but a modest one; not a boastful one, butan apologetic one. They ought not to be allowed much space among betterpeople--people who did something--I grant that; but they ought at leastto be allowed to state why they didn't do anything, and also to explainthe process by which they didn't do anything. Surely this kind of lightmust have a sort of value.
Out West there was a good deal of confusion in men's minds during thefirst months of the great trouble--a good deal of unsettledness, ofleaning first this way, then that, then the other way. It was hardfor us to get our bearings. I call to mind an instance of this. I waspiloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina hadgone out of the Union on December 20, 1860. My pilot-mate was a NewYorker. He was strong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listento me with any patience; my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because myfather had owned slaves. I said, in palliation of this dark fact, thatI had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was agreat wrong, and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned ifhe could think it right to give away the property of the family whenhe was so straitened in means. My mate retorted that a mere impulse wasnothing--anybody could pretend to a good impulse; and went on decryingmy Unionism and libelling my ancestry. A month later the secessionatmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi, and Ibecame a rebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans, January 26,when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his full share of the rebelshouting, but was bitterly opposed to letting me do mine. He said that Icame of bad stock--of a father who had been willing to set slaves free.In the following summer he was piloting a Federal gun-boat and shoutingfor the Union again, and I was in the Confederate army. I held his notefor some borrowed money. He was one of the most upright men I ever knew;but he repudiated that note without hesitation, because I was a rebel,and the son of a man who had owned slaves.
In that summer--of 1861--the first wash of the wave of war broke uponthe shores of Missouri. Our State was invaded by the Union forces. Theytook possession of St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points.The Governor, Claib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fiftythousand militia to repel the invader.
I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had beenspent--Hannibal, Marion County. Several of us got together in a secretplace by night and formed ourselves into a military company. One TomLyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no militaryexperience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant. We had nofirst lieutenant; I do not know why; it was long ago. There were fifteenof us. By the advice of an innocent connected with the organisation,we called ourselves the Marion Rangers. I do not remember that any onefound fault with the name. I did not; I thought it sounded quite well.The young fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample ofthe kind of stuff we were made of. He was young, ignorant, good-natured,well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalricnovels and singing forlorn love-ditties. He had some pathetic littlenickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which wasDunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in thatregion as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to hisear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d'Unlap. Thatcontented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave thenew name the same old pronunciation--emphasis on the front end of it.He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined--a thing to make oneshiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams andaffectations; he began to write his name so: d'Un Lap. And he waitedpatiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this workof art, and he had his reward at last; for he lived to see that nameaccepted, and the emphasis put where he wanted it, by people who hadknown him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had beenas familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure ofvictory at last is the courage that can wait. He said he had found, byconsulting some ancient French chronicles, that the name was rightly andoriginally written d'Un Lap; and said that if it were translated intoEnglish it would mean Peterson: Lap, Latin or Greek, he said, for stoneor rock, same as the French Pierre, that is to say, Peter; d', of orfrom; un, a or one; hence d'Un Lap, of or from a stone or a Peter; thatis to say, one who is the son of a stone, the son of a Peter--Peterson.Our militia company were not learned, and the explanation confused them;so they called him Peterson Dunlap. He proved useful to us in his way;he named our camps for us, and he generally struck a name that was 'noslouch,' as the boys said.
That is one sample of us. Another was Ed Stevens, son of the townjeweller,--trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright,educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious inlife to him. As far as he was concerned, this military expedition ofours was simply a holiday. I should say that about half of us lookedupon it in the same way; not consciously, perhaps, but unconsciously. Wedid not think; we were not capable of it. As for myself, I was full ofunreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and fourin the morning, for a while; grateful to have a change, new scenes, newoccupations, a new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went; Idid not go into the details; as a rule one doesn't at twenty-five.
Another sample was Smith, the blacksmith's apprentice. This vast donkeyhad some pluck, of a slow and sluggish nature, but a soft heart; at onetime he would knock a horse down for some impropriety, and at another hewould get homesick and cry. However, he had one ultimate credit to hisaccount which some of us hadn't: he stuck to the war, and was killed inbattle at last.
Jo Bowers, another sample, was a huge, good-natured, flax-headed lubber;lazy, sentimental, full of harmless brag, a grumbler by nature; anexperienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar,and yet not a successful one, for he had had no intelligent training,but was allowed to come up just any way. This life was serious enough tohim, and seldom satisfactory. But he was a good fellow, anyway, andthe boys all liked him. He was made orderly sergeant; Stevens was madecorporal.
These samples will answer--and they are quite fair ones. Well, this herdof cattle started for the war. What could you expect of them? They didas well as they knew how, but really what was justly to be expected ofthem? Nothing, I should say. That is what they did.
We waited for a dark night, for caution and secrecy were necessary;then, toward midnight, we stole in couples and from various directionsto the Griffith place, beyond the town; from that point we set outtogether on foot. Hannibal lies at the extreme south-eastern corner ofMarion County, on the Mississippi River; our objective point was thehamlet of New London, ten miles away, in Ralls County.
The first hour was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter. But thatcould not be kept up. The steady trudging came to be like work; theplay had somehow oozed out of it; the stillness of the woods and thesombreness of the night began to throw a depressing influence over thespirits of the boys, and presently the talking died out and each personshut himself up in his own thoughts. During the last half of the secondhour nobody said a word.
Now we approached a log farm-house where, according to report, there wasa guard of five Union soldiers. Lyman called a halt; and there, in thedeep gloom of the overhanging branches, he began to whisper a plan ofassault upon that house, which made the gloom more depressing thanit was before. It was a crucial moment; we realised, with a coldsuddenness, that here was no jest--we were standing face to face withactual war. We were equal to the occasion. In our response there was nohesitation, no indecision: we said that if Lyman wanted to meddle withthose soldiers, he could go ahead and do it; but if he waited for us tofollow him, he would wait a long time.
Lyman urged, pleaded, tried to shame us, but it had no effect.Our course was plain, our minds were made up: we would flank thefarmhouse--go out around. And that is what we did. We turned theposition.
We struck into the woods and entered upon a rough time, stumbling overroots, getting tangled in vines, and torn by briers. At last we reachedan open place in a safe region, and sat down, blown and hot, to cool offand nurse our scratches and bruises. Lyman was annoyed, but the rest ofus were cheerful; we had flanked the farm-house, we had made our firstmilitary movement, and it was a success; we had nothing to fret about,we were feeling just the other way. Horse-play and laughing began again;the expedition was become a holiday frolic once more.
Then we had two more hours of dull trudging and ultimate silence anddepression; then, about dawn, we straggled into New London, soiled,heel-blistered, fagged with our little march, and all of us exceptStevens in a sour and raspy humour and privately down on the war. Westacked our shabby old shot-guns in Colonel Ralls's barn, and thenwent in a body and breakfasted with that veteran of the Mexican War.Afterwards he took us to a distant meadow, and there in the shade of atree we listened to an old-fashioned speech from him, full of gunpowderand glory, full of that adjective-piling, mixed metaphor, and windydeclamation which was regarded as eloquence in that ancient time andthat remote region; and then he swore us on the Bible to be faithful tothe State of Missouri and drive all invaders from her soil, no matterwhence they might come or under what flag they might march. This mixedus considerably, and we could not make out just what service wewere embarked in; but Colonel Ralls, the practised politician andphrase-juggler, was not similarly in doubt; he knew quite clearly thathe had invested us in the cause of the Southern Confederacy. He closedthe solemnities by belting around me the sword which his neighbour,colonel Brown, had worn at Buena Vista and Molino del Rey; and heaccompanied this act with another impressive blast.
Then we formed in line of battle and marched four miles to a shady andpleasant piece of woods on the border of the far-reached expanses of aflowery prairie. It was an enchanting region for war--our kind of war.
We pierced the forest about half a mile, and took up a strong position,with some low, rocky, and wooded hills behind us, and a purling, limpidcreek in front. Straightway half the command were in swimming, and theother half fishing. The ass with the French name gave this positiona romantic title, but it was too long, so the boys shortened andsimplified it to Camp Ralls.
We occupied an old maple-sugar camp, whose half-rotted troughs werestill propped against the trees. A long corn-crib served for sleepingquarters for the battalion. On our left, half a mile away, was Mason'sfarm and house; and he was a friend to the cause. Shortly after noon thefarmers began to arrive from several directions, with mules and horsesfor our use, and these they lent us for as long as the war might last,which they judged would be about three months. The animals were of allsizes, all colours, and all breeds. They were mainly young and frisky,and nobody in the command could stay on them long at a time; for we weretown boys, and ignorant of horsemanship. The creature that fell to myshare was a very small mule, and yet so quick and active that it couldthrow me without difficulty; and it did this whenever I got on it.Then it would bray--stretching its neck out, laying its ears back,and spreading its jaws till you could see down to its works. It was adisagreeable animal, in every way. If I took it by the bridle and triedto lead it off the grounds, it would sit down and brace back, and noone could budge it. However, I was not entirely destitute of militaryresources, and I did presently manage to spoil this game; for I had seenmany a steam-boat aground in my time, and knew a trick or two which evena grounded mule would be obliged to respect. There was a well by thecorn-crib; so I substituted thirty fathom of rope for the bridle, andfetched him home with the windlass.
I will anticipate here sufficiently to say that we did learn to ride,after some days' practice, but never well. We could not learn to likeour animals; they were not choice ones, and most of them had annoyingpeculiarities of one kind or another. Stevens's horse would carry him,when he was not noticing, under the huge excrescences which form on thetrunks of oak-trees, and wipe him out of the saddle; in this way Stevensgot several bad hurts. Sergeant Bowers's horse was very large andtall, with slim, long legs, and looked like a railroad bridge. His sizeenabled him to reach all about, and as far as he wanted to, with hishead; so he was always biting Bowers's legs. On the march, in the sun,Bowers slept a good deal; and as soon as the horse recognised that hewas asleep he would reach around and bite him on the leg. His legs wereblack and blue with bites. This was the only thing that could ever makehim swear, but this always did; whenever the horse bit him he alwaysswore, and of course Stevens, who laughed at everything, laughed atthis, and would even get into such convulsions over it as to lose hisbalance and fall off his horse; and then Bowers, already irritatedby the pain of the horse-bite, would resent the laughter with hardlanguage, and there would be a quarrel; so that horse made no end oftrouble and bad blood in the command.
However, I will get back to where I was--our first afternoon in thesugar-camp. The sugar-troughs came very handy as horse-troughs, and wehad plenty of corn to fill them with. I ordered Sergeant Bowers to feedmy mule; but he said that if I reckoned he went to war to be dry-nurseto a mule, it wouldn't take me very long to find out my mistake. Ibelieved that this was insubordination, but I was full of uncertaintiesabout everything military, and so I let the thing pass, and went andordered Smith, the blacksmith's apprentice, to feed the mule; but hemerely gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensiblyseven-year-old horse gives you when you lift his lip and find he isfourteen, and turned his back on me. I then went to the captain, andasked if it was not right and proper and military for me to have anorderly. He said it was, but as there was only one orderly in the corps,it was but right that he himself should have Bowers on his staff. Bowerssaid he wouldn't serve on anybody's staff; and if anybody thought hecould make him, let him try it. So, of course, the thing had to bedropped; there was no other way.
Next, nobody would cook; it was considered a degradation; so we had nodinner. We lazied the rest of the pleasant afternoon away, some dozingunder the trees, some smoking cob-pipes and talking sweethearts and war,some playing games. By late supper-time all hands were famished; andto meet the difficulty all hands turned to, on an equal footing, andgathered wood, built fires, and cooked the meal. Afterward everythingwas smooth for a while; then trouble broke out between the corporal andthe sergeant, each claiming to rank the other. Nobody knew which was thehigher office; so Lyman had to settle the matter by making the rank ofboth officers equal. The commander of an ignorant crew like that hasmany troubles and vexations which probably do not occur in the regulararmy at all. However, with the song-singing and yarn-spinning around thecamp-fire, everything presently became serene again; and by-and-by weraked the corn down level in one end of the crib, and all went to bed onit, tying a horse to the door, so that he would neigh if any one triedto get in.(1)
We had some horsemanship drill every forenoon; then, afternoons, werode off here and there in squads a few miles, and visited the farmers'girls, and had a youthful good time, and got an honest good dinner orsupper, and then home again to camp, happy and content.
For a time, life was idly delicious, it was perfect; there was nothingto mar it. Then came some farmers with an alarm one day. They said itwas rumoured that the enemy were advancing in our direction, fromover Hyde's prairie. The result was a sharp stir among us, and generalconsternation. It was a rude awakening from our pleasant trance.The rumour was but a rumour--nothing definite about it; so, in theconfusion, we did not know which way to retreat. Lyman was for notretreating at all, in these uncertain circumstances; but he found thatif he tried to maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for thecommand were in no humour to put up with insubordination. So he yieldedthe point and called a council of war--to consist of himself and thethree other officers; but the privates made such a fuss about being leftout, that
we had to allow them to remain, for they were already present,and doing the most of the talking too. The question was, which way toretreat; but all were so flurried that nobody seemed to have even aguess to offer. Except Lyman. He explained in a few calm words, thatinasmuch as the enemy were approaching from over Hyde's prairie, ourcourse was simple: all we had to do was not to retreat toward him; anyother direction would answer our needs perfectly. Everybody saw ina moment how true this was, and how wise; so Lyman got a great manycompliments. It was now decided that we should fall back upon Mason'sfarm.
It was after dark by this time, and as we could not know how soon theenemy might arrive, it did not seem best to try to take the horses andthings with us; so we only took the guns and ammunition, and started atonce. The route was very rough and hilly and rocky, and presently thenight grew very black and rain began to fall; so we had a troublesometime of it, struggling and stumbling along in the dark; and soon someperson slipped and fell, and then the next person behind stumbled overhim and fell, and so did the rest, one after the other; and then Bowerscame with the keg of powder in his arms, whilst the command were allmixed together, arms and legs, on the muddy slope; and so he fell, ofcourse, with the keg, and this started the whole detachment down thehill in a body, and they landed in the brook at the bottom in a pile,and each that was undermost pulling the hair and scratching and bitingthose that were on top of him; and those that were being scratched andbitten, scratching and biting the rest in their turn, and all sayingthey would die before they would ever go to war again if they ever gotout of this brook this time, and the invader might rot for all theycared, and the country along with them--and all such talk as that, whichwas dismal to hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices,and such a grisly dark place and so wet, and the enemy maybe coming anymoment.
The keg of powder was lost, and the guns too; so the growling andcomplaining continued straight along whilst the brigade pawed around thepasty hillside and slopped around in the brook hunting for these things;consequently we lost considerable time at this; and then we heard asound, and held our breath and listened, and it seemed to be the enemycoming, though it could have been a cow, for it had a cough like a cow;but we did not wait, but left a couple of guns behind and struck out forMason's again as briskly as we could scramble along in the dark. But wegot lost presently among the rugged little ravines, and wasted a deal oftime finding the way again, so it was after nine when we reached Mason'sstile at last; and then before we could open our mouths to give thecountersign, several dogs came bounding over the fence, with great riotand noise, and each of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousersand began to back away with him. We could not shoot the dogs withoutendangering the persons they were attached to; so we had to look on,helpless, at what was perhaps the most mortifying spectacle of the civilwar. There was light enough, and to spare, for the Masons had now runout on the porch with candles in their hands. The old man and his soncame and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but Bowers's; but theycouldn't undo his dog, they didn't know his combination; he was of thebull kind, and seemed to be set with a Yale time-lock; but they got himloose at last with some scalding water, of which Bowers got his shareand returned thanks. Peterson Dunlap afterwards made up a fine name forthis engagement, and also for the night march which preceded it, butboth have long ago faded out of my memory.
We now went into the house, and they began to ask us a world ofquestions, whereby it presently came out that we did not know anythingconcerning who or what we were running from; so the old gentleman madehimself very frank, and said we were a curious breed of soldiers, andguessed we could be depended on to end up the war in time, because noGovernment could stand the expense of the shoe-leather we should costit trying to follow us around. 'Marion Rangers! good name, b'gosh!' saidhe. And wanted to know why we hadn't had a picket-guard at the placewhere the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn't sent out ascouting party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of hisstrength, and so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strongposition upon a mere vague rumour--and so on, and so forth, till hemade us all feel shabbier than the dogs had done, and not half soenthusiastically welcome. So we went to bed shamed and low-spirited;except Stevens. Soon Stevens began to devise a garment for Bowers whichcould be made to automatically display his battle-scars to the grateful,or conceal them from the envious, according to his occasions; but Bowerswas in no humour for this, so there was a fight, and when it was overStevens had some battle-scars of his own to think about.
Then we got a little sleep. But after all we had gone through, ouractivities were not over for the night; for about two o'clock in themorning we heard a shout of warning from down the lane, accompanied bya chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and flyingaround to find out what the alarm was about. The alarmist was a horsemanwho gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was on its way fromHannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like ours whichit could find, and said we had no time to lose. Farmer Mason was ina flurry this time, himself. He hurried us out of the house with allhaste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us where to hideourselves and our tell-tale guns among the ravines half a mile away. Itwas raining heavily.
We struck down the lane, then across some rocky pasture-land whichoffered good advantages for stumbling; consequently we were down in themud most of the time, and every time a man went down he blackguarded thewar, and the people who started it, and everybody connected with it, andgave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to gointo it. At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there wehuddled ourselves under the streaming trees, and sent the negro backhome. It was a dismal and heart-breaking time. We were like to bedrowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the boomingthunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. Thedrenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery stillwas the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a dayolder. A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as beingamong the possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of thecampaign, and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare. Asfor doubting that so barbarous an order had been given, not one of usdid that.
The long night wore itself out at last, and then the negro came to uswith the news that the alarm had manifestly been a false one, and thatbreakfast would soon be ready. Straightway we were light-hearted again,and the world was bright, and life as full of hope and promise asever--for we were young then. How long ago that was! Twenty-four years.
The mongrel child of philology named the night's refuge CampDevastation, and no soul objected. The Masons gave us a Missouri countrybreakfast, in Missourian abundance, and we needed it: hot biscuits; hot'wheat bread' prettily criss-crossed in a lattice pattern on top;hot corn pone; fried chicken; bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk,etc.;--and the world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equalto such a breakfast, as it is cooked in the South.
We stayed several days at Mason's; and after all these years the memoryof the dullness, the stillness and lifelessness of that slumberousfarm-house still oppresses my spirit as with a sense of the presenceof death and mourning. There was nothing to do, nothing to think about;there was no interest in life. The male part of the household were awayin the fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight; therewas no sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning-wheel, forevermoaning out from some distant room--the most lonesome sound in nature,a sound steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness oflife. The family went to bed about dark every night, and as we were notinvited to intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs. Thosenights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up tilltwelve. We lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, andgrew old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for theclock-strikes. This was no place for town boys. So at last it was withsomething very like joy that we received news that the enemy were on ourtrack again. With a new birth of
the old warrior spirit, we sprang toour places in line of battle and fell back on Camp Ralls.
Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason's talk, and he now gaveorders that our camp should be guarded against surprise by the postingof pickets. I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road inHyde's prairie. Night shut down black and threatening. I told SergeantBowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight; and, just as Iwas expecting, he said he wouldn't do it. I tried to get others to go,but all refused. Some excused themselves on account of the weather;but the rest were frank enough to say they wouldn't go in any kindof weather. This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but itseemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were scores of littlecamps scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening. Thesecamps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to asturdy independence, and who did not know what it meant to be orderedaround by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly alltheir lives, in the village or on the farm. It is quite within theprobabilities that this same thing was happening all over the South.James Redpath recognised the justice of this assumption, and furnishedthe following instance in support of it. During a short stay in EastTennessee he was in a citizen colonel's tent one day, talking, whena big private appeared at the door, and without salute or othercircumlocution said to the colonel:
'Say, Jim, I'm a-goin' home for a few days.'
'What for?'
'Well, I hain't b'en there for a right smart while, and I'd like to seehow things is comin' on.'
'How long are you going to be gone?'
''Bout two weeks.'
'Well don't be gone longer than that; and get back sooner if you can.'
That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where theprivate had broken it off. This was in the first months of the war, ofcourse. The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-GeneralThomas H. Harris. He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow,and well liked; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole andmodest-salaried operator in our telegraph office, where he had to sendabout one dispatch a week in ordinary times, and two when there was arush of business; consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day,on the wing, and delivered a military command of some sort, in a largemilitary fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got fromthe assembled soldiery:
'Oh, now, what'll you take to don't, Tom Harris!'
It was quite the natural thing. One might justly imagine that we werehopeless material for war. And so we seemed, in our ignorant state; butthere were those among us who afterward learned the grim trade; learnedto obey like machines; became valuable soldiers; fought all through thewar, and came out at the end with excellent records. One of the veryboys who refused to go out on picket duty that night, and called me anass for thinking he would expose himself to danger in such a foolhardyway, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was a yearolder.
I did secure my picket that night--not by authority, but by diplomacy.I got Bowers to go, by agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the timebeing, and go along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate. Westayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy darkness andthe rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness but Bowers's monotonousgrowlings at the war and the weather; then we began to nod, andpresently found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle; so we gaveup the tedious job, and went back to the camp without waiting for therelief guard. We rode into camp without interruption or objection fromanybody, and the enemy could have done the same, for there were nosentries. Everybody was asleep; at midnight there was nobody to send outanother picket, so none was sent. We never tried to establish a watch atnight again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out inthe daytime.
In that camp the whole command slept on the corn in the big corn-crib;and there was usually a general row before morning, for the place wasfull of rats, and they would scramble over the boys' bodies and faces,annoying and irritating everybody; and now and then they would bite someone's toe, and the person who owned the toe would start up and magnifyhis English and begin to throw corn in the dark. The ears were halfas heavy as bricks, and when they struck they hurt. The persons struckwould respond, and inside of five minutes every man would be locked ina death-grip with his neighbour. There was a grievous deal of blood shedin the corn-crib, but this was all that was spilt while I was in thewar. No, that is not quite true. But for one circumstance it would havebeen all. I will come to that now.
Our scares were frequent. Every few days rumours would come that theenemy were approaching. In these cases we always fell back on some othercamp of ours; we never stayed where we were. But the rumours alwaysturned out to be false; so at last even we began to grow indifferentto them. One night a negro was sent to our corn-crib with the same oldwarning: the enemy was hovering in our neighbourhood. We all said lethim hover. We resolved to stay still and be comfortable. It was a finewarlike resolution, and no doubt we all felt the stir of it in ourveins--for a moment. We had been having a very jolly time, that was fullof horse-play and school-boy hilarity; but that cooled down now, andpresently the fast-waning fire of forced jokes and forced laughs diedout altogether, and the company became silent. Silent and nervous. Andsoon uneasy--worried--apprehensive. We had said we would stay, and wewere committed. We could have been persuaded to go, but there was nobodybrave enough to suggest it. An almost noiseless movement presently beganin the dark, by a general and unvoiced impulse. When the movement wascompleted, each man knew that he was not the only person who had creptto the front wall and had his eye at a crack between the logs. No, wewere all there; all there with our hearts in our throats, and staringout toward the sugar-troughs where the forest foot-path came through. Itwas late, and there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere. There was aveiled moonlight, which was only just strong enough to enable us to markthe general shape of objects. Presently a muffled sound caught our ears,and we recognised it as the hoof-beats of a horse or horses. And rightaway a figure appeared in the forest path; it could have been made ofsmoke, its mass had so little sharpness of outline. It was a man onhorseback; and it seemed to me that there were others behind him. I gothold of a gun in the dark, and pushed it through a crack between thelogs, hardly knowing what I was doing, I was so dazed with fright.Somebody said 'Fire!' I pulled the trigger. I seemed to see a hundredflashes and hear a hundred reports, then I saw the man fall down out ofthe saddle. My first feeling was of surprised gratification; my firstimpulse was an apprentice-sportsman's impulse to run and pick up hisgame. Somebody said, hardly audibly, 'Good--we've got him!--wait for therest.' But the rest did not come. There was not a sound, not the whisperof a leaf; just perfect stillness; an uncanny kind of stillness, whichwas all the more uncanny on account of the damp, earthy, late-nightsmells now rising and pervading it. Then, wondering, we crept stealthilyout, and approached the man. When we got to him the moon revealed himdistinctly. He was lying on his back, with his arms abroad; hismouth was open and his chest heaving with long gasps, and his whiteshirt-front was all splashed with blood. The thought shot through methat I was a murderer; that I had killed a man--a man who had never doneme any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through mymarrow. I was down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead;and I would have given anything then--my own life freely--to make himagain what he had been five minutes before. And all the boys seemedto be feeling in the same way; they hung over him, full of pityinginterest, and tried all they could to help him, and said all sorts ofregretful things. They had forgotten all about the enemy; they thoughtonly of this one forlorn unit of the foe. Once my imagination persuadedme that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowyeyes, and it seemed to me that I would rather he had stabbed me thandone that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, abouthis wife and child; and I thought with a new despair, 'This thing that Ihave done does not end with him; it falls upon them too, and they neverdid me any harm, any more than he.'
r /> In a little while the man was dead. He was killed in war; killed in fairand legitimate war; killed in battle, as you might say; and yet hewas as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been theirbrother. The boys stood there a half hour sorrowing over him, andrecalling the details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be, andif he were a spy, and saying that if it were to do over again they wouldnot hurt him unless he attacked them first. It soon came out that minewas not the only shot fired; there were five others--a division ofthe guilt which was a grateful relief to me, since it in some degreelightened and diminished the burden I was carrying. There were six shotsfired at once; but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heatedimagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.
The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He was a stranger in thecountry; that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of himgot to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it. I couldnot drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such awanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must bejust that--the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personalanimosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help ifyou found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. Mycampaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equippedfor this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I fora child's nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of shamsoldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect. Thesemorbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did notbelieve I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed meguiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I hadnever hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my bestto hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseasedimagination, demonstration goes for nothing.
The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have alreadytold of it. We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another,and eating up the country--I marvel now at the patience of the farmersand their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, theywere as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it. Inone of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot,who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose careerbristled with desperate adventures. The look and style of his comradessuggested that they had not come into the war to play, and theirdeeds made good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and goodrevolver-shots; but their favourite arm was the lasso. Each had one athis pommel, and could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time,on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.
In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith ofsixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-madebowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of theIsthmus. It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practisingtheir murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless oldfanatic.
The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the villageof Florida, where I was born--in Monroe County. Here we were warned, oneday, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regimentat his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went apart andconsulted; then we went back and told the other companies present thatthe war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband. Theywere getting ready, themselves, to fall back on some place or other, andwere only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to arrive atany moment; so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while, but themajority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back, and didn'tneed any of Tom Harris's help; we could get along perfectly well withouthim and save time too. So about half of our fifteen, including myself,mounted and left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion andstayed--stayed through the war.
An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with two or threepeople in his company--his staff, probably, but we could not tell; noneof them was in uniform; uniforms had not come into vogue among us yet.Harris ordered us back; but we told him there was a Union colonel comingwith a whole regiment in his wake, and it looked as if there was goingto be a disturbance; so we had concluded to go home. He raged a little,but it was of no use; our minds were made up. We had done our share; hadkilled one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let him go andkill the rest, and that would end the war. I did not see that briskyoung general again until last year; then he was wearing white hair andwhiskers.
In time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened meout of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent--GeneralGrant. I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown asI was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, 'Grant?--UlyssesS. Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before.' It seems difficultto realise that there was once a time when such a remark could berationally made; but there was, and I was within a few miles of theplace and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.
The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine lightly aside asbeing valueless. It has this value: it is a not unfair picture of whatwent on in many and many a militia camp in the first months of therebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without thesteadying and heartening influence or trained leaders; when all theircircumstances were new and strange, and charged with exaggeratedterrors, and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in thefield had turned them from rabbits into soldiers. If this side of thepicture of that early day has not before been put into history, thenhistory has been to that degree incomplete, for it had and has itsrightful place there. There was more Bull Run material scattered throughthe early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run.And yet it learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the greatbattles later. I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited.I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the manthat invented retreating.
(1) It was always my impression that that was what the horse was therefor, and I know that it was also the impression of at least one otherof the command, for we talked about it at the time, and admired themilitary ingenuity of the device; but when I was out West three yearsago I was told by Mr. A. G. Fuqua, a member of our company, that thehorse was his, that the leaving him tied at the door was a matter ofmere forgetfulness, and that to attribute it to intelligent inventionwas to give him quite too much credit. In support of his position, hecalled my attention to the suggestive fact that the artifice was notemployed again. I had not thought of that before.
MEISTERSCHAFT
IN THREE ACTS (1)
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
MR. STEPHENSON. MARGARET STEPHENSON. GEORGE FRANKLIN. ANNIE STEPHENSON. WILLIAM JACKSON. MRS. BLUMENTHAL, the Wirthin. GRETCHEN, Kellnerin