CHAPTER XVI

THE CHICKAHOMINY

A boggy, tree-strewn stretch of lowlands where whitish mists hung thick at dawn and whence miasma vapors rose under the broiling sun of midday.

A delightful place for duck and quail shooting in midwinter. In summer a rank plague spot--and incidentally, on this particular summer of 1862, the camping ground of the army of the Potomac. The malarial region whose name, even to-day, sends a shudder along the bent spine of many an oldster.

Chickahominy Swamp.

For months Major-General McClellan, commander of the army of the Potomac, had pursued his fated peninsula campaign. Along the peninsula in early spring he had marched his mighty army to the speedy capture of Richmond.

Battles were lost; battles were won. Chances were lost; chances were blindly thrown away.

More than once the spires of Richmond were in plain view to the grim, tired men of the ranks. On one occasion, had they been allowed to press their advantage, they could have charged into the Confederate capital’s streets at the heels of a lesser body of foes who were in headlong flight.

But that one golden chance had been lost through official hesitation; and it could never come again.

For Lee and Jackson, by massing their scattered forces, rendered the city impregnable. Whenever fresh danger seemed to threaten Richmond, Lee made a demonstration toward Washington, which caused a rushing of Federal regiments to repel the supposed danger and rendered a mass attack on Richmond out of the question.

So, through a terrible summer of non-achievement, the once redoubtable army of the Potomac lay for the most part in Chickahominy Swamp. Lay there and rotted.

Pestilence did not “stalk” through the camps. It swept through them like the lightning breath of the death-angel.

To one man who died in battle four died of disease. A locality that even the heat-hardened Virginians were wont to shun in summer, Chickahominy Swamp exacted horrible toll of lives from the Northern invaders.

Thus rested, wearily inactive, the army that was the hope and pride of the Union. And at every turn Lee and Jackson outgeneraled its leaders; the Confederate force opposing to the ill-led Northerners’ greater bulk a speed and deftness that paralyzed its foe.

So that at last the North, which had so excitedly shouted “On to Richmond!” beheld in growing amaze the reverses of its bravest sons, and clamored vainly for a change. From Washington, too, came first protests, then rebukes, then an imperative command that the peninsula campaign be brought to an end and the army of the Potomac remove from the Chickahominy pesthole.

Back from the swamp and to less fatal ground, farther away from the lost goal of its ambition, the huge army was withdrawn, the Confederates working havoc upon their retreating foes.

It was in one of these flank attacks--a mere fleabite for the main body of the army, but as vital as Gettysburg itself to the army corps directly concerned in it--that Lieutenant James Dadd won his captaincy for gallant conduct in the face of the enemy.

A week later the demi-corps to which his regiment was attached chanced to be far to the left of the massed army on special detail, and was returning to headquarters.

The regiments, marching in close formation, were ascending the long, gradual slope of an almost interminable hill when their videttes appeared over the summit, riding back like mad, while at almost the same moment from a wood to their left, and slightly to their rear, broke out an irregular line of white smoke.

A masked battery in the forest, supported by several regiments of Confederate riflemen, had opened fire on them.

Before the nearest Federal ranks could wheel to repel the attack the flying videttes from in front reported a large body of Confederates who had somehow gotten between the detachment and the main army, and were approaching at the “double” from the far side of the hill up which the line of march led.

Even the Federal corps commander--a political appointee with three months’ actual military experience--saw the gravity of the position. Cut off from in front and attacked on the left flank, they might well be captured as had been more than one equally large body of Federals during the calamitous year.

And on realizing that fact the newly appointed corps commander, who was still weak in nerve and body from a touch of swamp-fever, proceeded to lose his head.

Regardless of the presumably greater danger that was approaching from behind the far-off hilltop to the front, he noted only the more palpable peril in that booming cannonade and rifle-fire from the wood to the left. Being only a temporary fool and not a coward, he stuttered to his aids a series of orders that sent fully half his attenuated corps swinging leftward in close-formation attack on the forest.

Fully twelve hundred yards of open country lay between the wood-edge and the Federal line.

To charge a seen foe is one thing; to attack an invisible enemy who is ensconced in unknown numbers behind a screen of leaves is quite another. And this the advancing line promptly realized.

The order to charge was given. Across the field of fresh-cut rye-stubble started the Federals.

(A charge, in a picture-book, is an inspiring sight. In real life it consists of various blocks and lines and other formations of uniformed pawns moving awkwardly and with exasperating slowness, all in one direction, athwart the vast checker-board. A retreat is far more picturesque and less geometrical.)

Advancing by order, in close alignment, the blue-clad men offered a mark not to be missed. A nearsighted child in the thick wood-fringe could scarce have failed to wreak vengeance in their ranks.

The whole edge of the forest was white now with belching smoke from which spat jets of yellow and red fire. Solid shot, grape and rifle-fire tore grotesque gaps in the oncoming ranks.

With no opportunity to avenge their losses or even to see their slayers, the Federals plunged onward.

First at the double they moved, their officers trotting, sword in hand, at the side of the companies, barking sharp commands and closing as well as might be each new and ugly rent in the lines. Then the orderly, rhythmic run grew shambling.

One man in a regiment’s front rank wheeled and tried to bolt back--anywhere out of reach of the whizzing, crashing, viewless death that was striking down his companions at every step.

A lieutenant struck the coward across the face with the flat of his sword and howled curses at him, striving to beat him back to his duty.

But by this time another man, and yet other men, had followed the panic example. Here and there, from the chokingly tight front rank, men had begun to drop out, or to plunge back into the line just behind them, throwing out of gear the exactness of company formations, infecting hundreds with their terror.

It was no longer possible for officers to check individual cases of fear. Their whole attention was taken up in keeping the bulk of their men in line and in keeping them advancing.

The dead strewed the stubble ground in windrows. The fire-streaked smoke rolled out in a blinding, acrid wave from the nearing fringe of trees.

And at every yard of distance gained the Confederate volleys waxed more and more accurate, the piles of dead higher and thicker.

Unscathed, the wood’s defenders were killing by wholesale. And a corps commander’s folly was paid for in the lives of hundreds of better, wiser, braver men than himself.

A riderless horse, his back broken by a grapeshot, crawled along the space between the Federals and the wood, dragging his hind legs behind him and screaming hideously above the near-by din.

A major, sword in hand, running ten yards in advance of his regiment and hallooing to them to come on, stopped abruptly, his brown face turning suddenly to a mask of blood, and fell where he stood.

He was major in Dad’s regiment.

And Dad himself, as the men wavered on seeing their loved officer fall, leaped forward, sword aloft, to take the dead man’s place ahead of the line.

His lean body tense, his mild eyes aflame, the sword of old Ehud Sessions whirling in wild encouragement above his bared head, Captain James Dadd charged onward, yelling to his men to follow. And not only his own company, but the whole regiment, obeyed that call.

For another fifty yards the Federal line--now irregular as a snake-fence--plunged forward; Dad’s regiment, the Blankth Ohio Infantry, forming its foremost point.

But flesh and blood could not stand the increasingly galling fire from the forest. Mortal nerves were not proof against the horrible strain of advancing to be struck down by the invisible, with no chance to strike a single return blow.

To have halted, if only once, and to have fired a chance volley, even ineffective, or its effect unseen, into the trees and underbrush whence poured that hail of death, would have been infinite relief.

But the officers had had their orders from the chattering corps commander. And those orders were to advance at the double and to continue to advance until the Federal line should come to grips with the foe.

Despite the frenzied exertions of their officers, the men began to lag. The trot slacked to a walk. The walk to an almost general and very wavering halt.

Dad, hoarse and exhausted, knew that the next move would be a cave-in of the demoralized line, then a retreat that would change to panic flight and a universal hurling away of rifles and knapsacks. Moreover, that soldiers who once allowed themselves to flee in that fashion would never again be the same men.

Their usefulness in war would be impaired by full fifty per cent., even as a horse that once has run away is no longer to be trusted.

The old man redoubled his furious efforts to rally his regiment and to force it onward to the charge. The whole crooked line had halted.

It was wavering like the tail of a kite. Presently it must snap.

Then--from nowhere in particular--from the skies, some vowed afterward--came a diversion.

Down the field, in a line parallel to the woods, and a dozen rods in front of the wavering Federal line, galloped a gun-carriage horse, its harness flapping and flying about its flashing hoofs.

Astride the barebacked horse was a small and marvelous figure. The figure of a short and stocky boy, fiery red of hair, his powder-blacked face freckled, his little eyes glaring. He was clad in the obviously chopped-down uniform of an artilleryman.

On his back, suspended by a strap that was fastened around his neck, bounced and rattled an enormous drum. In the boy’s trouser waistband were stuck two drumsticks.

The lad was kicking vehemently with his heels at his horse’s stomach. But as he came midway adown the Federal line he jerked his mount to a halt, slid to earth and, in the same gesture, unslung his drum.

He had halted not twenty feet from Dad.

“Now, then,” shrilled the boy, his harsh young voice ringing out like a trumpet-call, “what’re you longlegged loafers waiting for? Hey? Charge, you chumps! Charge!”

He faced the woods. His drum rolled out a deafening tattoo.

“Battle Jimmie!” shouted someone in the ranks.

“Jimmie!” echoed Dad. “Jimmie! Oh, it’s _my_ boy!”

“_Charge!_” shrilled Jimmie, his drum seconding the fiery command.

And they charged.